Hardware setup question

[bartron]

My New Items are in Blue!

I have a Abit ST6/Celly 1.0a @ 1.25(Stock cooling for now)/ Kinston PC 133 256MB /WD 13.2G HDD ATA/66(5400 RPM)/ Affery 56K CDROM/ MitsumiCDRW/ 100MB Zip/and a promise ATA/66 Controler card(I needed it that Promise card for my old setup) That's the main stuff.....

At this point I must have the Promise card to operate correctly!

My question is this: I need to Fdisk to get rid of all the formats that were there on my old setup and setup a new one but what is the best way to setup the four main things (HDD, ZIp, CDRW, and CDROM) that go to the 2 IDE slots. I know I will nedd to set two to master and two to slave but was wondering what would be the best?

Thanks for any and all help

 

[RainMaQer]

My advice would be to set the HD as the Primary master and the CDrom as the secondary master. Put the Zip drive on the primary as the slave and the CDRW on the secondary as the slave. This puts both cdroms on the same channel and seperate from the HD which in my experience has yeilded the best performance.

If you have a CDrom or burner on the same channel as the HD your transfer rates between the HD and CD/Burner will be slightly hindered... or if both need accessed at the same time. Having them on seperate channels illeviates a potential bottleneck.

 

[UnseenMenace]

I personally pretty much agree with RainMaQer however I would put the CDRW as the master on IDE 2 and the CD-ROM as the slave due to the fact that from my experiences some CDRW drives just appear to work better as a master ( my Mitsumi for example is sometimes not detected by WinXP when set as a slave, however no such problems are displayed when the drive is a master )

 

[bartron]

I agree and thanks but I do have one more question, my CDROM is 56X and my CDRW is only 24X (It's an older one) will this hinder my CDROM proformance by being a slave? I don't think it will but I would really like this to be my last FDISK for a long time. LOL
Thanks again, man I really like these forums and these quick responses.

 

[RainMaQer]

I agree and thanks but I do have one more question, my CDROM is 56X and my CDRW is only 24X (It's an older one) will this hinder my CDROM proformance by being a slave? I don't think it will but I would really like this to be my last FDISK for a long time. LOL
Thanks again, man I really like these forums and these quick responses.

Performance would only be affected when transfering between the 2 drives. Like if you were to clone a CD or something. Then data would only transfer as fast as the SLOWEST drive on the line... this would be the case whether the CDRW was master or not. During normal use they will perform as fast as they're made to alone.

 

[bartron]

I thought so and thanks again.
Now it's off to make this thing right once and for all. (Is that OK to say about a Microsoft product. LOL)

 

[bartron]

Worked like a champ and everything is running smooth. Thanks again. (I did have to unhook my Zip to get it to load on C:\ instead of F:\)