UDMA/ATA 133 -- lower speed devices on same controller

[tucsontier]

If I have only one ATA100/133 drive the rest are slower to any degree, and one is on the same IDE controller as the 100/133 drive, will i still get 100/133 performance out of the drive?

Tucsontier

[BipolarBill]

IMO, yes. As long as you don't frequently access the slower drive, performance should not suffer.

[Midknyte]

I checked Maxtor and Promise's websites and they don't say that you will lose performance if you have say a ata133 and a ata100 drive on the same channel. they do recommend that you keep your cdroms and dvds off of the controller, since they generally don't support even ata66 standard. :D

[otheos]

As long as both devices support DMA (anthing between mutliword DMA1 to UDMA6 (ata133) the controller will operate each device at its own speed without performance loss.

You should know though that moving data between devices on the same cable is extremely slow due to IDE's inability to do so.

[tucsontier]

Related to Otheos comment, what would be the ideal configuration if one has two harddrives (one udma 100 or 133, the other 33 or 66), a cd-rw, and a cd-rom? On my current system, the harddrives are on one, the cd devices on another. the motherboard i will be getting has RAID, as well. I wonder be surprised if this has been a topic before, but i can't find the topic if it has been.

Tucsontier

[BipolarBill]

Place each hard drive as master on a channel on the RAID controller (don't create an array) and the others as master on the onboard controller. That's what the rest of us nuts do!