cable select

[badgers]

I have a round IDE cable.

I need to put my DVD on the channel with my hard drive.

it would be easier to set the hard drive to master and the DVD to slave. Then connect the hard drive to the 'slave' connector of the IDE cable and the DVD to the 'master connector of the IDE cable.
it is just a physical position of the devices lends itself to doing this.

Does setting jumpers for master and slave effect performance?

would it be better to have the burner and dvd on the same channel?

I frequently make backups from disk to disk. I had been told that a burner and a DVD or CD on the same channel will not work as well. any thoughts on this?
thank you for your time and have a good day

[Thirus44]

ok I had problems with this a while ago. Master CD to Master HD to IDE slot one. Slave CD to Slave HD to IDE slot 2.

[WillysNut]

I think Thirus is on the right track so I'll try to expand a little. If you want the best overall hard drive performance, you should place the hard drive, alone, on an IDE channel. The DVD and Burner should be set in a Master/Slave arrangement and connected to the second IDE channel.

If you are using software to backup your HDD to your burner, then the above setup *should* still offer the best performance. The hard drive would be talking on channel one, and the Burner on channel 2.

By placing the DVD or the Burner on the same cable/channel with the HDD, the two need to share time to communicate on the channel, usually creating a performance drop in HDD access.

Think it over and try a few different setups. Depending on the apps you run, one or the other may work equally well. Good luck!

[kaillum]

But...... if you have your dvd and cdrw on the same ide channel, you wont be able to burn copies of disks 'on the fly' as it's automatically disabled if the drives are on the same channel......

[badgers]

that is what I thought.
the DVD and the CDRW need to be on different channels to copy disks

[Goldwing]

Originally posted by badgers
the DVD and the CDRW need to be on different channels to copy disks

Only if you are doing "on the fly" copying.

If you are doing an "image" copy then the program temporarily writes an image of the first disk to your HDD and then copies it to the CDRW. This method is a little slower for the first copy but much safer and if making more than one copy is faster than on the fly (as it only needs to read the source disk once)