Two Hard-drives and a CD-RW on one cable?

[RaoulDuke]

Ok, i've just removed my CD-RW (it was slaved off the hard-drive) and replaced it with a fresh (secondry) hard-drive. I'm going to install XP-Pro on this second drive and was wondering what was to become of my CD-RW??

Can i slave it elsewhere or i am i asking a really dumb question?? There's no space on the current lead but in theory could a slave it off the second hard-drive if i had a lead with enough connections

/me bangs head on the table

 

[edfair]

Unless you are talking SCSI, two devices per channel, one master other slave. You may have two channels, and could put it as either master there, probably would be found as slave also but not sure, and as slave to another master device on that channel.
And you could buy another controller , which would allow you to have another 4 devices in addition to the 4 allowed by the usual built in. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[Karl Blessing]

Basic IDE rule, you can never have more than two devices on one cable.

Also most motherboards come with two controllers on the board, a primary and secondary IDE connector, I would just connect the CDrw ( master or slave doesnt matter if its by itself usually ) onto the secondary IDE connection.

Also another rule of thumb. Make sure both your harddrives are the same speed, otherwise when you put two drives on the same cable, the cable goes at the speed of the slower drive ( this is often why its not recomended to connect a HDD and a ATAP(cdrom, zip etc ) on the same cable, reduces the performance of the machine )

If you just want your second drive to do storage and what not, I would recomend getting an External Firewire "Enclosure" such as the Pyro Firewire drive kit. This allows you to use your HDD ( dont put your system drive externally just your storage drive, and you can still install stuff to it and everything, the firewire port has more than about 5 times the bandwidth that the highest IDE drive needs )

I Belive they also make USB2.0 enclosures tho I'm not to keen on using USB for mass storage.

Getting an IDE harddrive ( an ATA/66 preferably as I dont know any drive kits in retail stores that use ATA/100 or higher, tho they will support ATA/100 just wont go at ATA/100 speed ) , and a drive kit would be far cheaper than buying one of those Firewire/USB2.0 drives for several hundred more, and even those dont go 480mbit like the cable can, but just as fast as a normal IDE drive.

Just a sugestion. Karl Blessing aka kb244{fastHACK}