IDE Connectivity for Best Performance/Burning

[Slats]

Hi,

I will be upgrading my PC tomorrow, I connect my IDE device in the following way at present.

Primary Master: Seagate 60GB
Primary Slave: Seagate 30GB

Secondary Master: Ricoh Burner
Secondary Slave: Pioneer A04

Is this a good config? i mean if it;s not broken don;t fix it. it;s all working fine now.

But it would be great to hear your opinions.

Thanks

Slats

[DJB14336]

That is the only snag--must always copy to hard drive first. Not a prob with PSx/PS2 backups (that is how it HAS to be done), but it is nice to do Audio CD's on the fly.......small price to pay for reliability though.

As for the 16 bit slow down...not sure if it is that much of an issue anymore with the newer controllers out there. I have an Add-in ATA100 card, and it didn't slow anything down with my burner on same line as my secondary drive, but they were all DMA 2 or higher capable drives anyway. Only way to know for sure is to test them with SiSandra or other benchmark utility.

The big trick with putting 2 CD type devices is which will handle the traffic best. Remember the Master drive sets the pace for the channel. On older controllers, a slow slave would slow down the Master--I found running them in Cable Select mode allowed my CDR to run faster when my DVDROM was connected as Slave on the MBoard's ATA66 Controller, setting them by Master w/ Slave and Slave caused a slight slow down in CDR reads--most noticeable in Audio Ripping. Again, you may never know unless you test them.

http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.htm

Great tools here.

Good Luck!