I found that the drives were jumpered for Master and Slave. I made the
change to Cable Select for both drives. It didn't work at first, and I don't
know why. I had to reseat the jumpers and power plugs and reboot several
times before the main drive would boot. But now it's working OK, and there
appears to be no change in performance for the drives. Thus as long as it's
working, there's no reason to change to Cable Select from Master/Slave. But
of course I didn't know until I tried it.

A negative side effect of my adventure under the hood is that my processor's
fan now has a loud, high-pitched whine. It's too loud and annoying, so I'll
have to fix it. Naturally I blew out the dust while I had the computer cover
off, but that apparently caused the fan noise to start. I tried
repositioning wires leading to the fan, but that has no effect. I'll have to
take the fan apart and use some WD40, or replace it, I guess.
-E

"HH" wrote in message
...
The original IDE cable is a Cable Select cable. so the drives should be
jumpered CS.
HH

"Euclid" wrote in message
ink.net...
I have a Compaq Presario S4020WM purchased from Wal-Mart last year. I
replaced the original hard drive with 120G and 80G drives. My question is
whether it makes a difference in performance whether I selected Master and
Slave for the jumper settings, or Cable Select for one or both of them? I
can't remember offhand. Of course I can open up the computer case and
look,
but I'd like to know beforehand if possible.

This question is prompted by the fact that I'm getting slow hard drive
access with my primary application, slow enough that it is slowing down
that
program significantly, and I don't think that is supposed to happen. Most
other people using the same application and ordinary PCs don't report such
a
problem.

I suppose this could also be a problem with bus speed and the motherboard,
but I don't know about such things. Also in reading I notice that the
channels used by the drives are important, but I don't know how to check
them.

Any advice appreciated. They're both Maxtor drives, and of course they're
on
the same Maxtor IDE cable - one at the end connector, the other on the
middle connector. Here's some system specs:
2.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon XP
992 Megabytes Installed Memory
Board: KM266-8235
Motherboard Chipset VIA VT8375 ProSavageDDR KM266
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
BIOS: Phoenix Technologies, LTD AM37320 08/01/2003
S3 Graphics ProSavageDDR [Display adapter]
MAXTOR 6L080J4 [Hard drive] (80.05 GB) -- drive 1, s/n 664213219209, rev
A93.0500, SMART Status: Healthy
Maxtor 6Y120P0 [Hard drive] (122.94 GB) -- drive 0, s/n Y31WBLZE, rev
YAR41BW0, SMART Status: Healthy

-E