An IDE bus question!!!

R

Reqs

New member
I've pored over everything I can find in the newsgroups and other places regarding this issue, but I still need a little help. I've got a WD 8GB HD that has been a great Cake Walk drive for several years. I finally upgraded to a new box (PIII 550, DVD-ROM, Win98 on the 15GB TriGem Samsung HD [anyone heard of this drive?]).

I want to format the 8GB WD HD and use it as a second drive for audio. I also want to add my CDRW from the old box. Here are the questions: The new box has 2 IDE buses, as usual. What goes where--HD's on same bus, master/slave, or hard drives as masters on each bus with CDRW and DVD-ROM as slaves?

Another Q: Do I install CW on the second (audio) drive, or should it go on the OS drive and just point to a WaveData directory on the audio drive? Where do I put my plug-ins for optimal power?

I know also to format FAT32 with the z/32 or z/64 switch, but is there anything else I need to keep in mind?

I know alot of this has been discussed extensively but I'm still confused. Your help is greatly appreciated!

-RNT
 
Hey Reqs,

You have a few options, I would see this one as being the typical setup:

15GB Hard drive as master on primary. CD-ROM as slave.
8GB WD as master on secondary. DVD as slave.

You should install CW on your 15GB drive, and yeah, point all audio data to your WD.
Plugin's will go on the 15GB.

If your comfortable reinstalling OS's, I would be tempted to use your WD as the primary for your programs, and the new 15GB Samsung drive for all your audio data.

In this case it would be WD as Primary master, CD-ROM primary slave, Samsung as secondary master, DVD as slave.
 
Thanks Emeric. I am comfortable with installing new OSes but I'm also lazy. I've got a fair amount of SW on the new drive and I think I'll keep that there and format the old drive for use as the audio drive. 8BG should be enough for me for the time being, I can archive to CDRW as necessary.

Thanks again for your help!
 
I would mostly agree with what was said with one exception. Puting your CD / DVD /CDR drives on seperate buses is the way to go if you are doing a lot of copying from cd to cdr. This is because the IDE bus doesnt perform that well with 2 devices moving data at once. You get CDR buffer underruns and slag lots of CDs. But I would assume that most of your CD burning will be music files from your WD hard drive. So you may wish to put both of your hard drives as Master/Slave on your primary controller.
You REALLY want to do this if you have an older Pentium system, because on those motherboards the secondary controller was usually a simple IDE controller while the primary would be an "enhanced" EIDE controller. Hard disk performance would suffer on the secondary controller. On the newer motherboards I have seen (I do some computer tech work) both primary and secondary controller are of the EIDE type.
 
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