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Old March 10th 04, 12:22 AM
~misfit~
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kony wrote:
On Tue, 9 Mar 2004 13:08:58 -0600, "*Vanguard*"
wrote:

"Steve James" said in
:
Hi

I have two HD's on the same IDE channel, I think one is faster than
the other (ATA and RPM), will the fastest one be 'held back' by the
slowest one or not ? I have my O/S and program files on the main
(fastest) drive and only use the slower one for storage and the
pagefile. (to reduce head travel)

MTIA

Steve


It depends on what motherboard chipset you use. I had a 3+ year-old
Pentium 3 800MHz Slot1 (SECC2) system that used the AOpen AX6BC
motherboard which uses Intel's 440BX chipset. The IDE controller
operated only in single mode; i.e., it would get set for whatever was
the slowest reported device. Doesn't matter what the IDE ports were
set for in the OS. The IDE controller provides 2 channels. For that
system, it was important to match the ATA spec of the devices on each
IDE port and try to NOT mix ATA (hard drive) and ATAPI (CD-ROM drive)
devices on the same port. CD-ROM drives then and still only operate
up to UDMA-33. Putting an UDMA-33/66/100/133 hard drive on the same
IDE channel as, say, a UDMA-33 CD-ROM drive, had the controller
operate at the least-common-denominator of whatever was the slowest
device on that channel so the hard drive would also operate at
UDMA-33.


Ummmm, that had nothing to do with the 2nd device, the 440BX chipset
only supports up to ATA33, there is no possible way for any device in
any possible configuration to run any faster than ATA33 from it's
onboard controller.


Correct.

snip


So for the old chipsets, they could operate the 2 IDE channels at
different modes (i.e., speeds) but they could only use the lowest
device's mode for all devices on the same channel. One channel could
run in one mode and the other channel could run in a different mode,
but a channel itself could only operate in one mode. Now comes
along newer chipsets that can support multiple concurrent modes on
the same IDE channel.


That happened around 1994, IIRC.


You do indeed RC.

The short answer is: Put any drive wherever you want to put it. As long as
the boot drive is primary master the rest doesn't matter so's you'd notice.
--
~misfit~