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two hd's on same IDE channel
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 |
#2
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"Steve James" wrote in message . .. 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 Steve, Short answer: Yes. Pagefile should be located on the boot partition. If you only want to consider speed, it should be on the fastest drive. Long answer; My understanding of the IDE bus is that the drives will operate a the speed (transfer rate) of the slowest device on a channel. RPM rates of the drives are definitely independent (i.e., A 7200RPM drive always spins at 7200RPM, even with a 5400RPM drive attached to the same channel). My practical experience suggests; 1) This generally excludes CD/DVD drives. Although I've experienced some that seem to "slow-down" a hard drive. 2) Note the term "channel". As you know most computers have on-board IDE controllers. Most IDE controllers operate 2 channels. (EIDE1/EIDE2 or Primary/Secondary connections on the MB). My experience dictates for the best hard drive through-put drives of "like types" (i.e., ATA/33 or ATA100 or ATA133) should be on the same channel. That said: Of course, you'll want to check performance at each step including the current configuration. Find a tool that'll measures drive performance in each configuration. This way you can measure your results and determine the optimum connections. If you have a total of 3 devices; (2 HDD's, 1 CD) I'd connect the slower of the 2 hard drives on the same channel with the CD and leave the faster drive by itself. If you have 4 devices; I'd try 1 HD and 1 other device on each channel. Articles I've read and my personal experience with pagefile.sys indicates that it should be located on the boot partition. Rick http://www.howtorecoverdata.com |
#3
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"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. So I had my 2 hard drives on IDE0 and the CD-RW and DVD-ROM drives on IDE1 to keep the slower UDMA-33 CD-type drives off the IDE channel for the faster hard drives. One of my hard drives was UDMA-100 while the other was UDMA-66 but beyond UDMA-66 there is little real speed increase on end-user host whose primary function is to run applications rather than operate as a file server. The interrupted use of the hard drive along with all the head travel obviates the momentary but short-lived burst mode of the drive. One drive spun at 7200 RPM and the other at 5400 RPM but that only affects how long to get to a particular sector on the same track (so keeping your drive defragmented helps). 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. If you visit Intel's web site to look at, say, the hardware specs for their 845E chipset, the doc for its paired ICH4 (southbridge) chip notes, "Each IDE device can have independent timings". So you can have a UDMA-100 hard drive on the same IDE port as a UDMA-33 CD-ROM drive and the controller will use the best mode to support the highest transfer rate of each device. There's no harm in configuring the devices as was needed under the old 1-mode-per-channel chipsets but there's no point, either. So the better setup now is to have the hard drives on separate IDE channels (to maximum concurrent bandwidth capacity for the most used devices) and put the CD-type drives on whichever channel you want (but preferrably on whichever is not the IDE channel being used for the Windows "boot" partition, if possible). Microsoft's terminology regarding which is the boot and system partition is a bit backwards of common sense. To Microsoft, the "system partition" is where are located the bootup files and the program located in the boot sector of the hard drive partition that the bootstrap code in the MBR uses to start loading the OS. For Windows, this is wherever are placed the NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI files. The "boot partition" is wherever is the rest of Windows that gets loaded, like NTOSKRNL.EXE. So you have boot files on the system partition and system files on the boot partition. Yeah, go figure. See http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314470. The system and boot OS partitions can be in the same hard drive partition and is the typical scenario with Windows installed wholly on, say, the C: drive. The system BIOS can only read the bootstrap code from MBR (master boot record, or sector 0) on the first detected physical hard drive and uses the partition table in that MBR to determine which is the current active primary partition (which is only on that same drive since the partition table only has entries for that drive). The MBR bootstrap program then loads the boot program in first sector of that partition. Since the system BIOS can only read the MBR on the first detected physical hard drive, the "system partition" for Windows must be on that same first hard drive. You can change this behavior if you replace the standard bootstrap program in the MBR with a more robust program, like a boot manager (IBM BootManager, Powerquest's BootMagic, etc.). However, the "boot partition" for the rest of Windows can be in the same partition on that hard drive, in another partition on that same hard drive, or in a partition on a completely different hard drive. If you have 2 hard drives then you should place pagefiles on BOTH hard drives. The "boot partition" (where Windows is read from after it got started) should have a pagefile set to 64KB larger than your system RAM size but can be larger. Then configure a pagefile on the other hard drive of the same size or larger, typically 1.5 to 2.5 times your RAM size. Windows will detect that a pagefile exists on a hard drive other than its boot partition and give it higher priority for use. To reduce fragmentation of the pagefiles, set their min and max size to the same value. The defrag program included in Windows will not defrag the pagefiles, so you need to use the trick of rebooting into Recovery Console mode to delete the pagefiles (after already having defragged the drives) so they get recreated on Window startup. Some 3rd party defraggers, like Diskeeeper and PerfectDisk, will defrag the pagefile(s). Some folks will even create a separate partition on the non-boot partition hard drive just for that pagefile to keep it from getting fragmented with data and applications that normally show up on the other hard drive. I've never bothered going that extreme but then I regularly defrag my drives. The pagefile being 1 piece might have a tiny performance advantage to a pagefile sliced into 3 or 5 pieces but that's insignificant to the performance loss if the pagefile was sliced into hundreds of pieces. Even if the drives spin at different speeds, you'll want to allocate a pagefile on the non-boot partition to allow Windows to page out virtual memory while it can still concurrently read/write files on its own boot partition. If the hard drives are UDMA-66 or higher, it really doesn't matter that the primarily used pagefile on the non-boot partition is spec'ed to use a slightly slower burst mode. However, once you get a difference of UDMA-100 (nothing really for UDMA-133) against UDMA-33 for 2 hard drives, and especially if the UDMA-33 spins at 5400 RPM and the UDMA-100 drive spins at 7200 RPM, you'll probably want to forego using a pagefile on that slower non-boot partition hard drive. |
#4
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"*Vanguard*" wrote:
....same IDE channel.... ....pagefile....separate partition..... Hey, if you wanna write more stuff, I'm takin' notes! :-) *TimDaniels* |
#5
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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. 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. |
#6
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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~ |
#7
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"kony" said in :
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. And hard drives started at UDMA-33, huh? Forgot about the older PIO modes? |
#8
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On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 05:39:04 -0600, "*Vanguard*"
wrote: "kony" said in : 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. And hard drives started at UDMA-33, huh? Forgot about the older PIO modes? Forget? No, I meant nothing more than I wrote... at least the way it read it me, it seemed as though you were implying that this was causing the hard drives to drop down to ATA33 mode, which was the highest mode they could support anyway. If you're claiming that PIO mode ATAPI devices will slow down the BC chipset, I won't refute that as I don't recall enough first-hand experiences trying to run PIO mode as late as the BX chipset. |
#9
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"kony" said in :
And hard drives started at UDMA-33, huh? Forgot about the older PIO modes? Forget? No, I meant nothing more than I wrote... Okay, reread your reply and you're right that UDMA-33 was the highest mode supported by Intel's 440BX chipset. I just wanted to make sure the it was understood that all modes (PIO and UDMA) might mix okay, might not, and I wasn't sure about the 440BX ... until today when I finally decided to look. I got rid of my last Intel 440BX box a little while ago. As I recall, that one was configured with the ATA devices (hard drives) on IDE0 and the ATAPI devices (CD-RW & DVD-ROM) on IDE1. Over the lifetime of this mobo, it first started out with really old drives scavanged from even older boxes and just ran DOS and then SCO and, I think, Solaris x86, so it did have some old PIO-only mode hard drives. About when Windows got put on it was when the drives were updated. In fact, because the mobo's IDE ports only supported up to UDMA-33, I put in a Promise Ultra100 to better support the UDMA-66 & -100 drives and so each had its own channel (which also meant the ATAPI devices could each be placed on their own channel on the mobo's IDE ports). I'm not sure the ATA and ATAPI devices really had to be separated on different channels for the Intel 440BX. I think that was how it was first configured because it was unknown at the start if independent timing was supported per channel; not everything was on the Internet back then for ease in lookup. I had another coworker using the box who kept claiming the ATA & ATAPI devices should be separated on different channels and since it didn't hurt I just let him have his way. Although we don't have that old 440BX box anymore, I finally decided to check on my break. Went to Intel and dug around for awhile and found for the 82371AB PCI-to-ISA chip (southbridge that provides the IDE channels), "Integrated IDE Controller: Independent timing of up to 4 drives." Aha! I was right all along. Oh well, running in the lowest-common-denominator hardware configuration didn't hurt, either. Thanks for participating. Always something to learn in the newsgroups. |
#10
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On older motherboards the I/O speed will be the protocol of the slower device; PIO mode is worst case. This was usually a problem with a hard drive and a CDROM on the same cable. Some say that newer boards with dual fifo can run different protocol for each device. I have not tried any tests to verify this. Steve James wrote: 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 -- Mike Walsh West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A. |
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