Hi folks, not so quick question on HDD cables.

I have installed a new 120gig drive to act as a secondary drive for my PC (I work a lot on audio files, much space needed!) Main drive is 60 gig, both Ultra ATA 100.(this one has the Win XP system on it)

I also have (on the other IDE cable) a DVD/CDr combo drive, another CDr/rw drive.
PC is a P4 northwood 2.4 gHz, 750meg DDR ram

I'm currently using an old IDE cable to connect the two HDD, working fine, but should I ideally be using an Ultra ATA 100 rated cable (do they exist?)

Also, what would be the ideal master/slave setup for this? the DVD combo was the installed drive on the PC, but I prefer to use the CDr/rw for burning, and bearinbg in mind I'm only using the 120gig disk for storage?

Cheers,
Micky

yes ultra ata 100/133 rated cables to exist. they should look more colorful *blue or gray connectors, other colors can exist, most likely NOT BLACK*

i have asked a technician and there is a difference. the cable with the black connectors are most likely only rated ata 33, and that would considerably lower performance.

well i do recommend you using ur separate burner (the only cd-rw drive). however, if the dvd combo drive is faster it mite be ok if you use that to burn. but do not kill the combo drive, burning 10+ cds a day. if the cd-rw is faster, then it shouldnt matter so much if you use the dvd combo since you can just replace it w/ a cheap dvd drive *the best 1 i dink costs only 40 bucks, 10 shipping*

The difference can easily be seen by the number of wires in the cable.  For ATA100 & 133 you need a cable with 80 wires.  An ATA33 cable will have only 40 wires.

Thanks for the info on the ATA100 cables, I'll have t upgrade, the cable that connected the original HDD had "ATA 100" stamped on it, but only one connector, so I used a dual connector IDE cable from my old PC Pii 400MHz, which is about six years old, so I'm assuming it's less than ATA100.
Any thoughts on master/slave designations for this set-up?
I'm assuming I'm going to put the HDD with the OS as primary master (which it is at present). Would it make sense to have either the DVD combo or the CDr/rw as the secondary master for ease of use in case I need to boot from CD rom? Does the designation between master/slave actually have any bearing on reliabilty or performance, or is it just used for the controller to make sense of the locations of the drives on the cables?

Yes, you'll want to leave the two hard drives on the same IDE channel (primary), connecting the CD-RW and DVD Combo drives on the secondary.  Contrary to what others might believe, the master/slave designation does NOT have any bearing on the performance of a drive.  It simply tells the BIOS which drives comes first, and which one second (which can affect drive letter assignments).

However, it has been said that some cheaply manufactured drives will only work as master depending on the device it is sharing the channel with.  Usually however, the position doesn't matter.

If you do serious CD-to-CD copying, you may want to look into getting a PCI IDE controller, which will give you 2 more IDE channels - 1 for each device!  That will help free up interrupt requests so that each device doesn't interfere with the other or overload the IDE bus.

~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
  - A. Einstein

Hi folks- Good info.

I upgraded the cable (yep, not a black connector in sight on it, blue & gray).
Reconnected the drives, keeping my 60gig "systems" drive as the primary master, and the 120gig "storage" drive as the secondary master.
Everything hums away nicely now. I might stick in another IDE controller if I see any slow-down on the CD burner, but it's a "buffer under-run free" type so I can't forsee any problems as speed isn't really a problem anyway when burning.
All I need to do now is speed up my system generally, as XP just ain't keeping up with my system (2.4gig P4 and 750megs DDR should not be this slow)

Cheers guys, you've been a great help!
Micky

Micky,

Have you turned off all the bells and whistles in XP? They can slow it down a lot.

Not yet. I'm going to be doing it carefully and cautiously!
I have absolutely zero experience of XP, it was preloaded on the machine when I bought it about a month ago. WinME is my system of choice, but I always intended to use more than 512megs RAM for the audio work anyway, so XP wasn't immediately dumped out the window.
I haven't found any sources on the web yet for specifically speeding up XP, do you know of any?
On my old WinME system, ihad just about everything turned off, and the system was VERY fast (Celeron 400 & 256sdram), faster than my current set-up!

The "ultra IDE" cable you refer to is for ATA66 and above and not just for ATA100/ATA133, just thought I would point that out as some DVDroms (all new slot and tray Pioneer DVDroms) are ATA66 and require an ultra cable, I am sure several other makes are ATA66 as well.(ultra cables are 80core ribbon, 40pin plug)                          Martin
                        

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

Micky,

Just do a Google search (eg, for Tweak XP).

I found a list by a guy called "Black Viper" who goes through all the different things that XP has running in the background, what they do, possile things that may not work after switching off, etc. Very thourough, I'll give it a try and see how it goes. I'll report back with my findings (and the address, if it's any good)
Micky

Yeah, Black Viper's stuff did the trick. Few more bits and pieces to be done yet on the tweaking front. Nice paint job, couple of layers of wax, stripes down the side, that sort of thing.

I got the tweak list on www.blackviper.com :)

Very concise, full explanations. Did the job!
Thanks for all your help guys, I'll be back on the forum again, hopefully giving help instead of needing it!
Micky