ok this might seem dumb but whats the deal with master/slave?

[inkleoneaters]

ok this might seem dumb but whats the deal with master/slave thing on ide. how does it affect drives, and whats the best way to set it up. also whats the diff between an 80 wire and a 40 wire ide cable.

ps. where can i get them for a reasonable price in the uk. ie less than 3 quid.

[PipeBom]

Master is the drive that comes first. If you have an opperating system on one hard disk which is set to slave, but no opperating system on the other which is set to master ( assuming you had 2 hard drives ), then you would get a boot error. This is because the cpu looks for the master first, before the slave. Its just a way of giving one drive ' more rights ' over another in your system.
Hope that helped. :)

[rogerdugans]

Precedence.
The bios sees a master first, and then a slave, and windows assigns drive letters acordingly: Primary ide: master C:, slave D:
Secondary ide: e:, slave f:.

For faster access to drives you are usually better off having the most commonly used drives as masters- primary master: os, secondary master: cd burner, etc. Doesn't always make much difference but it can.

40 pin ide cables are ata 33, 80 are ata 66/100:
if you have ata 33 devices there is no benefit from using an 80 pin cable

if you have ata 66/100 then you should use an 80 pin cable- if you use 40 pin you will be stuck at ata 33 speed.

Hope this answers the questions!

[hunter00]

until i can get a raid controller, my cdrom and burner are each masters and both my 60gb harddrives are slaves, honestly i see very little difference.