master/slave setup

[brg]

My system is set up as follows -

Primary master - Western Digital hard drive

Primary slave - Iomega Zip Drive

Secondary Master - Pioneer 106s DVDROM

Secondary Slave - Plextor 40x CDR

 

Is this the ideal setup? Would my system benefit otherwise (ie. reading or burning cds faster?)

 

Also, just enabled DMA on primary and secondary IDE channels and the DVDROM now is only able to read audio cds - application files won't initialize and a data cd's contents will list out but any particular file won't open and ends w/ an error message. If I switch back to PI0 mode then all is well again. Any reason why I should not be able to go DMA?

 

Thanks,

Brian

 

[ July 04, 2002, 03:15 PM: Message edited by: brg ]

[Greg Hess]

Seems fine brian. So I haven't replied to the thread. I just noticed it with zero replies. Odd.

 

Usually you'll find the best performance across the disk subsystem is usually found when moving the drives to a dedicated card, such as a promise raid, or other type of solution. This of course takes more irq's and can sometimes do more harm then good, but generally removing any other type of device off the hd's chain is a good thing.

[quizzy]

Hey greg.....

 

just a question, is primary to secondary faster then primary slave to primary master?? you know when copying files etc....???

 

thanx

 

[ July 17, 2002, 07:29 AM: Message edited by: quizzy ]

[Greg Hess]

No idea . And no I don't feel like testing it. Its usually a good idea to keep the hd on its own seperate chain if possible though.

 

Greg

[Guest keats76]

What chipset does your motherboard use? I'm guessing this is an AMD system on an older VIA chipset, perhaps KT133A, there were a number of known issues, especially for those unfortunate souls that also had a Soundblaster card installed. Make sure you have the latest drivers and bios installed on your Mobo, also, what operating system are you using? I'm assuming it's Microsoft based, so make sure you have the latest Service Pack/Updates installed. Other than that my only suggestion would be to move the CDR to the Secondary Master, and the DVD to the Secondary Slave (since playing DVD's in PIO mode sucks anyway, and I'm guessing you'd probably be burning more CD's than watching DVD's anyway). Personally, I'd also ditch the Iomega Zip drive as I've only had problems with them in the past, but that's your call. Gl