Hard Drive Questions

  • Thread starter Thread starter Beezoboy
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Beezoboy

Home Recording Guru
Ok I just got one of the Western Digital 7200 80 gig drives with 8 meg cache!! I now have a dedicated DAW somputer running WinXp with CoolEdit Pro and Sonar. Would it be better to keep the hard drive on the same IDE channel or put it on the other channel? It seems to me like it would be best on the other channel, but I had read somewhere back that if I put it on the same channel as a CD-Rom then it would revert to the lowest IDE speed (33). So I went ahead and put it on with my 40 gig drive both running at IDE 133.

Is this the best setup or could I get better performance by putting it on the other channel. I copied about 6 gigs from the 40 gig to the 80 gig in about 4 minutes. Is that good? Thats about 25 megabytes a second.

Let me know
Beezoboy
 
Put the new drive on the other (secondary) channel, it should work just fine.

That old wive's tale about a CD ROM slowing down a hard drive on the same IDE channel has been around for awhile, they tried to tell me the same thing when I installed my new hard drive on the secondary channel. Apparently this used to be true with the architecture used on some older computers.

If you do a search on this topic you'll see that many folks on the board have put one drive on the primary and one on the secondary with no ill effects.
 
Well my question is:

Will it be slowed down by having them on the same channel?

Beezoboy
 
I have both my HD's on the same ribbon if this is what your doing, then no problem, it will work fine.
 
Both are fine.

However if your CD-ROM is on PIO mode (common to a lot of CD-burners, for example) then you will face slowdowns when writing data from the drive to the CD (or, indeed the other way round), if they are on the same cable.

Also if you keep your drives on the same cable, you will have problems transfering data between drives, or when there is access to both drives simultaneously. This would be encountered for example when you are writing audio data to your second drive and the OS sends a service request, which would tap your primary drive.

There really is no free lunch. You'll just have to decide which slowdown you'd rather face (most people take the first route as the second can cause embarrasing slowdowns while recording a killer take).

OTOH, with most modern drives you'd be hard-pressed to tell a major difference.
 
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