Am I better off having my hard drives on seperate channels?

[b101010b]

At this point my hard drives are on the primary channel together the secondary is occupied by a dvd drive and a cd burner. I have an athlon xp2400+ on a k7s5a pro 512 megs of ram. thanx for any response.

[Shockedder]

The thing about the HDD's is this :

On an average MoBo there are 2 IDE Channels ( each with support for 2 equipments eg . HDD's ,CDROM's CDRW's , etc.)
The thing that makes the transfer of information faster is the DMA (Direct memory access) which enables the equipment to transfer data directly to memory without tying up the CPU.
However , DMA works only on one equipment on an IDE channel at one moment ; so if you had only 2 HDD's only , you could have tied them each to a channel and get better performance .
In your case however , the rule to the transfer efficiency is this ( the slow equipments << usualy the CD-units>> account for a performance drop in the faster equipment's performance if tied on the same channel .
Thus , the recommended config. is 2 HDD's on the same channel ; and the CD-units on the other one .
Greets , and thanks for reading my lengthy post . :t :p

[rmanet]

I'd also make sure you try to keep some space between drives, and some good case cooling - your HDDs and CD drives will last longer, and if you don't have a 300w or better brand psu you probably ought to consider it or even buy a new one - that may be your weak link down the road if you run into problems :t

[ukulele]

That board supports independant drive timing, as do most modern motherboards. That said, it really doesn't matter anymore.

[missiveusa]

That board supports independant drive timing, as do most modern motherboards. That said, it really doesn't matter anymore.
ukulele: Could you elaborate?

[ukulele]

On older systems a slower device would limit a faster device. That problem was eliminated years ago, but he myth still hangs on with newer hardware. I would setup the harddrives and optical drives on different channels. The advantage is that on the fly burns will be faster and HD to HD transfers will be faster. My setup is primary HD master and cdrom slave on ide 0 and cdrw/dvd master and HD slave on ide 1. Of course if you are using both devices that are on one channel at the same time each device will slow down the other because the controller can only access one device at a time. To get around that I use the cdrw to load software onto the primary HD and the cdrom to load software on the secondary HD. If I play an audio cd while I'm working of the primary HD I use the cdrw and don't notice any lag at all. I hope this helps.

[missiveusa]

Yes, the reason I ask is I plan to install a DVD+RW drive on a system that has 1 HDD and 1 optical drive. I'm trying to decide where to put it on which channel. Thanx.

[MrBurns]

Originally posted by missiveusa
Yes, the reason I ask is I plan to install a DVD+RW drive on a system that has 1 HDD and 1 optical drive. I'm trying to decide where to put it on which channel. Thanx.

I would install it on a different channel than the other optical drive. You should install the drive you use as primary drive on the secondary channel, and the other one as slave on the HDD channel. Master is alway faster than slave. It doesnt matter, if your second channel supports UDMA, because you dont need UDMA for optical drives (normal DMA is fast enough).