round cable or 40-pin 80????

[feeky]

i have just upgraded to an asus a7v266e m/b with an ibm 60gp ata 100 h/d. my question is what is the best way to connect my two hard drives and two cd roms to the m/b?
it doesnt have raid, i was sent a round ide cable with 3 connectors and a 40-pin 80 conductor cable with 3 connectors.
my other hard drive is just an old ata33, should i put my new ibm as primary master and old hard drive as primary slave on the 40-pin 80 or round cable?? will having an older hard drive slow the new one down?
suggestions please!!!

cheers feeky

[piyopiyo13]

You could:

1) Buy a PCI ATA100 controller. They can be bought for less than $70.

2) Connect slow hard drive with the CD-ROM/DVD (I'm assuming you have a CD/DVD and a CDRW) and the fast drive with the CDRW (I'm assuming that you don't burn data as often as you play normal CD's). That way, most of the time you will be using separate IDE channels. Option 1 is definitely recommended if you have the money though.

[Bovon]

I have no personal experience here, but I read that with the newer hard drives, using an older ATA 33 as a slave to an ATA 100 does not slow down the new drive. Older systems and older drives would. If this is correct, simply connect both drives to the 80 wire ATA 100 cable. the new drive as master and the older drive as slave. Even an older ATA 33 drive will perform better if used with an ATA 100 cable.

ATA 66 Promise PCI controller cards are quite cheap now, and you would not see any difference between using an ATA 100 vs ATA 66 if you should decide to do that. I use an ATA 66 controller with ny setup, and get good benchmark results as well as leaving the mainboard IDE chanels open for CD Rom and zip drives, ect.

There is a certain auction that we do not mention by name here that has ATA 66 Promise cards sometimes for around $10 bucks. I got 4 of those several months ago.

[D`Sypher]

You should always connect all harddrives to primary IDE channel
because the system always looks there first.
A slower HDD will not slow down a faster HDD when the fastest
HDD is connected to the last connector on the cable as master, because the system looks at this positon first.

[Kurylo]

The best way is to test it.
Old BX works in the lowest ATAxx, supported by your drives.
E.g. if you have a UDMA33 and UDMA66 drives, BX will work in DMA33 mode. The new chipsets (i815 etc) support "individual" DMA's, so you should not experience any slowdowns.