Hard drive and CD-ROM on the same IDE cable?

The hard drive that I'm using is for storage. It's a 7200rpm w/ 4mb cache. Would I be able to connect it on the same IDE cable as the CD-ROM? The only things that I would use it for it to play music and movies.

What are adverse effects of this type of setup?

I dont know the effects, but I wouldnt if I were you, just to be on the safe side. Sorry I can't fully answer your question though

Sure you can, why not?

But if you have two things on the same IDE cable, then they can't both read/write at the same time. So for example, if you have the cdrom and the hard drive on the same ide cable, and you're trying to copy something from that cdrom to that hard drive, it will go slower than if the hard drive and cd rom were on different ide cables, because the hard drive has to wait until the cdrom drive finishes reading, before it can write, as opposed to the hard drive writing while the cd is still reading if they were on different ide cables. But if you don't plan to often copy large files from the cdrom to the hard drive then there's no reason not to do it.

why do you want to do this anyway? Cable Management? Or sheer interest.

There is no reason in the world not to, and no adverse effects from putting it on the same cable. I'm guessing that this is a third drive to go along with your RAID array. Your only concern is correctly configuring your jumpers.

i think if you put them both on, it'll run at the slowest transfer speed.... so cd-rom drives are usually slower so it'll slow down the harddrive... but if you don't care about speed then go ahead.

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO DONT EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THIS I ALMOST FRIED MY BIOS BECAUSE IT READ THE BURNER AS MY HD!!! AHHH I DIDNT KNOW I...got the cables mixed up

Fried the BIOS? Joking, I think.

i am doing it just for cable management. Most likely I won't be burning from the hard drive on the same IDE cable. And yes, this drive is going to be mybackup/storage for my raid setup.

Make sure, if you do this, you use a hard drive IDE cable. If you look at the cables, the hard drive ones have paper thin wires, and more of them, while the cd drive ide cables have less wires and they are thicker. The cd drive ones are capable of much slower copy rates.

Also, as mentioned above, dont try using the cd drive and copying files from your hard drive at the same time, it doesnt work. Ive seen it in practive with 2 cd drives, trying to copy at the same time. The 1st cd drive spins up and copies about 500kb, then it slows down and the other one speeds up and copys about 500k. It ends up taking about 4 times as long.

^^^ I'm using this a rounded IDE cable. This would work correct?


http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....3&type=product

That's a ATA133 cable, it will work for all IDE drives.

I just put together my 2nd HD (finally got the damn thing running!) and could only find one extra IDE cable Anyway, I was told that it was possible but not recommeded....so far its working fine. Hopefully nothing happens.

Anybody who tells you that it's "not reccomended" to place two drives on the same cable is (...or at least should...) be concerned about one thing. Intracable communicaiton speeds.

Having two devices on the same cable means they have to essentially 'take turns' talking on the cable. If both drives need to read/write data, only one drive gets access to the IDE interface at a time. This means that performance between a master and slave on the same channel will suffer somewhat. If only one drive needs to read/write data (like most of the time) then the performance is the same.

Also, the thing about faster drives "slowing down" to the speed of the slowest drive on a cable is myth in modern times. In the old days, a BIOS would detect the slowest device on a channel and set each drive to talk at that speed. So if you had an ATA33 CD drive with an ATA66 hard drive, the BIOS would force the hard drive to talk at ATA33. Nowdays BIOSes are smart enough to let each device talk as fast as it wants. If you stick an ATA33 drive with an ATA133 drive, they'll each talk as fast as they can.


While having two devices share a cable isn't as good as letting each have their own, it's not worse 90% of the time (the other 10% it's a bit worse)
JigPu

im doing it, and ive been doing it for awhile now. no adverse effects, seeing as how if what they say is true that the cdrom cant read and write at the same time as the hard drive, it doesnt bother me much. i barely touch that burner of mine.

if this is you only cd rom it must be the master . if it is not then i would say make it the slave it will interfer less with the transfer rate if it is the slave.