Daisy Chain

[XunknownX]

Is it best to have a CD-RW chain off of the same IDE cable as the HD or just use the secondary IDE cable for CD-RW drives? I've heard it's easier for the CD-RW to burn if it's on the same cable as the HD, but then again I hear that the slowest piece of hardware on an IDE cable will make everything on that IDE cable run that speed. I'd hate to have an ATA133 HD run at ATA33 because of a CD-ROM or CD-RW on the same IDE cable.

[cack01]

Unless the drive can run at ATA100 or higher, than it is best to seperate them. The ribbon will run at the slower speed.

[Xaotic]

That's a common misconception dating from the era of PIO mode devices. Independent device timing, in the form of dual FIFO buffering, is used on all current mainboards. This allows devices to access the channel at their rated speeds, since the access is sequential and not shared. There will be delays when accessing both drives on the same cable, due to the fact that only one drive can be accessed at any given time. Some comtrollers have had issues where the faster drive needs to be at the end of the chain, but that's the only case where I've heard of a difference(other than XP which can throttle UDMA modes for CRC errors and PIO mode devices which revert the channel to PIO). Best practice is still to separate drives which might be simultaneously accessed, but it will work in either configuration.

[XunknownX]

Thanks for clearing that up. I've been pondering that for a while.

[TheGhengisKhan]

one possible issue is if you're connecting a CD-RW drive on the same cable as your HDD, the whole "one device at a time" thing comes into play when you're attempting to burn a CD, or when you're copying CD's to your HDD. This will slow down your CD burning, and CD ripping abilities greatly, due to the simple fact that it will load a Meg or 2 of data to your RAM, then send it to the other device, instead of being able to continusly stream the data from one device to the other.
All PC's that I build will always have the CD, CDRW, DVD drives on seperate cables from my HDD's for this reason alone.

[don256us]

I've always done it this way.

HDD and CD-ROM on Primary

CD-RW on secondary.

Most of my burning is from my HDD OR CD-ROM and to the CD-RW. ( I know. duh) By putting the CD-RW on the secondary channel, there is less traffic on any one channel. I always felt that if the HDD and CD-RW were on the same channel, that channel would have to do double duty.