IDE Hard Drive cable question

[silentbobdrummer]

This may seem like a stupid question, but if you have a CD/DVD rom on the secondary IDE header, can a secondary hard drive be on that header as a cable select if the main hard drive is sata?

[glc]

Certainly. Just jumper both drives cable select and use an 80 wire cable.

[silentbobdrummer]

Certainly. Just jumper both drives cable select and use an 80 wire cable.
so cable select the DVD drive as well as the hard drive or keep the DVD drive as master?

[Brad the best]

when you set your drives to cable select, the last drive on the ide cable in your case your dvd drive will be the master . when your jumper is set to cable select it automatically determines master and slave by the placement of the drives .

[glc]

BOTH should be cable select.

[silentbobdrummer]

Cool, now i'll have more room in my case by eleminating one of the IDE cables.

Thanks for the help.

[chuck4456]

Yeah, they just don't look all that good when you've finished a build.

[Cricket]

Cool, now i'll have more room in my case by eleminating one of the IDE cables.But now you have to consider the performance hit with both drives on the same IDE cable. With each drive on a separate IDE channel data transfer is faster from one drive to the other. But with both drives on the same IDE channel data transfer is slowed down by the fact that data can only travel in one direction at a time on the same IDE channel. So if you're moving data from the optical to the hard drive the data goes down to the controller, to RAM, waits around until it's time to head back to the controller (data can only travel in one direction at a time so data that wants to go up to the hard drive has to wait for the data moving down from the optical drive to the controller to RAM to finishing moving) and then back up the IDE cable to the hard drive once the way is clear.

Just something to consider.

:) Cricket

[silentbobdrummer]

I left it the way it is with the optical and hdd on separate controllers. the Cable select was acting funny and was only detecting one drive or the other.

[glc]

You may not have been using an 80 wire cable select cable. 40 wire cables still require master/slave jumpering.