Will I lose some speed?

[johnet]

I have a Maxtor 7200 rpm drive as the master and would like to add a Maxtor 5400 rpm drive as the slave. They are both ATA 100. If I put them on the same IDE cable will I lose performance on the 7200 HD? Does anyone see any problems with this setup?

[Midknyte]

Your 5400 will not slow down the 7200, but it will slow down the system when you access the 5400 drive. That is to be expected. You might want to put the 5400 on the second IDE controller if you plan to transfer data between the 7200 and 5400. That way you have as little contention on the IDE cable as possible. :)

[johnet]

I have a DVD and a CD-R as master and slave on the secondary IDE so I don't know where else to put the 5400 rpm drive. If it only slows the system down when accessing the 5400 drive it shouldn't be too much of a problem. I just want a place for data storage and I won't be running any applications off of it. I was more concerned that it would hurt the performance of the 7200 master drive. Thanks for the help.

[Midknyte]

You should be cool then. No problemo.

[otheos]

The problem is that when both devices on the cable are accessed (e.g copying data from one to other) the IDE controller cannot access them both simultaneously (IDE limitation) and this kills performance as the drives take turns (read a bit, switch to other drive, write a bit and so on).

Now the fact that your DVD and CDR are ont he same IDE channel means that they are subject to the same limitations and unless your CDR has burnproof, when you do "on the fly" copying of discs you'll have problems.

Ideally you split your devices so the ones you use simultaneously are in oposite channels.

So ideally you'd want.

PM: 7200rpm HDD
PS: DVD

SM: 5400rpm HDD
SS: CDR

Of course if you notice that you mostly build CDR discs from data on the 5400rpm, move the CDR as PS. Unfortunately there are only 2 combinations and a few more uses that you'd want your drives set up differently for each, but IDE is a compromise for value after all.

[Midknyte]

Otheos is correct. That's what I was trying to get at:
put the 5400 on the second IDE controller

if he's not going to access the drive too often, it would be ok, but the preferred setup would be as Otheos described. :)

[johnet]

I would like to try the setup you suggest otheos. The problem is the cables. With the ATA 100 cables I understand the master drive has to be on the end of the cable. The only way I could see to do this is to mount the HD's up in the external drive bays 1 above the DVD and 1 above the CD-R. Unfortunately my tower doesn't have the room for this. Am I missing something? Is there a way to mount the HD's down in the regular HD bay and configure it the way you suggest? I think I need to get a tower with 4 external drive bays.

[otheos]

While the specification says master last, slave middle of the cable, do try it as your cables/case allows and see. In my experience it works fine :)

[johnet]

Thanks for the advice. I'll experiment and see how it goes.