Multiple hard drives....(3)

[whattaguy]

SATA drive is not that much more than a standard IDE Drive. That is if you have not already bought the IDE drive.

Just my 2 cents

I agree with this...looking at your previous posts, dude. If you can still return your current drive, do that and exchange it for a native SATA drive. The price difference will actually be less than buying the converter (it's usually for those of us who are "stuck" with our PATA drives).

 

[thedude72701]

I agree with this...looking at your previous posts, dude. If you can still return your current drive, do that and exchange it for a native SATA drive. The price difference will actually be less than buying the converter (it's usually for those of us who are "stuck" with our PATA drives).

I would but I got a killer deal on it. $40 something at Circuit City for a 120GB WD with 8MB buffer.

 

[whattaguy]

That is a good deal. In that case, go with the converter.

 

[thedude72701]

Thanks everyone...I ordered the converter.

 

[dgatwood]

The problem with yoking your HDD with an optical drive on a single IDE channel is that, supposedly, the optical will degrade the performance of your HDD.

FWIW, I don't think that's the case for modern controllers, though you're right, it used to be true. Older controllers down-clocked the whole bus for the slowest drive. Now they just clock the bus differently depending on the drive select status, I think.

What will suck is copies between the optical drive and the hard drive on the same bus or between the two hard drives on the other bus.

 

[dgatwood]

Bad idea running your disk traffic accross the pci bus. Virtually guaranteed to interfere with your audio card. It would be better to get rid of one of the DVD drives. Otherwise if you can't squeeze 3 drives in there, you're better off just sticking with 2

There are ways of minimizing this.

1. Free IRQs by turning off unused devices. In theory, the interrupt controller on your motherboard should be able to salvage those newly-freed IRQs for use by PCI slots.

2. Find out how your PCI slots are ganged. In a three slot system, often one would slot be on one IRQ and the other two on a separate one. One may share an IRQ with the video hardware in some cases. Adjust card placement until the drive controller and the audio card do not share an IRQ.

3. If you have bandwidth constraints, you'll also be happy to note that due to trace length restrictions, the maximum number of newer, higher-speed PCI slots per bus is often as little as 1 or 2, so on any system with more than 2 slots, odds are you have more than one bus. The advice above about sharing IRQs... also applies to sharing busses.

4. In rare cases, you may still run into problems that can't be solved by the above. In those cases, you might try reducing the maximum DMA mode for the drive through software. This will force the drive performance to decrease, resulting in greater available bandwidth for use by other devices. That said, this is gross and should be avoided if at all possible. (There might be other rate-limiting mechanisms, depending on OS. I'm not a Windows person, so I couldn't begin to guess.)