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**Wombat** · 2 August 1999, 10:01

I agree with Jammrock. I believe in keeping the fastest devices together. I've heard (though I'm not positive), that the IDE channel will default to the lowest common speed, so teaming a HD with a CD-ROM drive (at least a non UDMA one), will slow down the HD.
Do I know what I'm talking about? Admittedly not sure on this one, but it's what I'd do.

Good luck,
Wombat

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503+ rev 1.2a, 128MB PC100 RAM, K6-2/350@400,RH6 & Win98,G200 Millenium (SGRAM), no plans to buy a G400

**Jammrock** · 2 August 1999, 16:17

P. Master: 18GB EIDE WD 7200 RPM ATA66.(One of the partitions is an empty 1GB for burning).

P. Slave: 10 GB EIDE Maxtor 7200 RPM ATA-33. First partition is for swap file only (w/an empty 1GB partition for burning)

S. Master: Ricoh EIDE MP 7060 6x/4x/24x

S. Slave: 10X Pioneer EIDE DVD-ROM

IMHO this is the best configuration, of course, you ask 10 people you get 10 answers. The UDMA 33 channel should be able to handle both HDD's with no slow down. Since the CPU can only actually do 1 thing at a time (multitasking just means that it switches tasks according to priority...the bus and IRQ design of Intel's x86 standard prohibit 2 things happening at once) there is no real reason to put the HDD's on seperate channels. This configuration is the more 'traditional' style.

Jammrock

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PIII 540 (120 MHz x 4.5 - 540), 256 MB PC133 SDRAM, ASUS P3B-F, Winblows 98 SuckyEdition, 18 GB WD Expert HDD, Encore 6x DVD w/ Dxr3 decoder, (TEMPORARY!!!) Voodoo 3 2000 @ 175 MHz which will be replaced by a Matrox G400 MAX, Sound Blaster Live! full retail, MAG DX715T 17

**merchant2** · 3 August 1999, 00:40

well here's what i did, i looked around and had almost enough parts to put together a whole nother box. i got a 45.00 case and slaped my memorex burnewr in a amd k6 200 with 64 meg ram an old 2.1 gig western hard drive a memorex 40x cd drive as a reader. 1 hard drive is master burner is secondary master and reader drive is primary slave. (ya i finaly found a use for a s3 virege gx/2 video card.) any thing over a 486 dx66 will make a good burning rig. and you dont have to worry about all those drives slowing down your gameing rig. look around you could probibly find a real cheap basic machine (even a used system for around 100.00 or 200.00 that would make a good rig. (if you work in a big company you may even be able to pick up an old system that they are tossing out.

i have put together many lowend systems for friends useing parts salvaged from old junk systems that were being tossed, 4 64 meg 72 pin simms pentium cpus ect.... (older monitors)

anyway that is one way to go set up a system for burning its much easyer and not that costly. be sides this way you can copy games i mean make cd's and not have to sit around waiting for it to finish burning (it is not recomended to do anything else while you are copying cd's or the copy messes up badly. (you will also find that you will burn more cd's than youn think.))))

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i don't know what im going to bitch about now that the avp patch is out.
p2 350 at 450, 196 meg pc100,10gig hard drive,5xdvd cl drive, xitel p. storm sound, 32meg g400 dualhead, acs 400 altec lansing speakers+yamaha rear, ch throttle, ch force fx, ch pedeals, hp laserjet 4, epson 400 color, ctx vl950 main mag dx17t secondary monitors
other systems k6-2 350 and k6 200.

**Fleabus** · 3 August 1999, 10:28

Thanks to all for the responses. Looks like I got carried away with where the HDDs should be.
I was told that the best place for the swap file to be was in its own partition located as the first one on a HDD which was master on the second channel. That likely is true but in my case, putting it on primary slave in Jammrock's suggested config is probably good enough. With 256MB of memory I rarely see much of a "swap file in use" with sysmon. I see ~40MB "in use" when I load a 32MB or so soundfont onto my Live but my HDDs stay quiet. No thrashing - whatever I do.

Merchant2, I don't think I'll be doing enough burning for that. I usually trade my old stuff up.

Wombat, I don't think one device will slow down another just by its presence in the chain. Makes sense that active ones would though.

On that point, whether I install the above to a Camino (ATA-66 support) or not, I was thinking of using Ultracable's 18" or< ATA-66 40/80 IDE cables for these devices. They aren't an expensive item and although they may or may not do any good, would you think they could possibly do harm?

**merchant2** · 4 August 1999, 09:45

i do use ultra cable. and even on my udma33 drive it makes a difrece. i no longer have the original comparison before and after numbers. but i was not able to activate the dma funtion of my equipment with my old cables and mother board. fic pa2013 rev2 and amd k6-2 350 with out vxd errors until i installed one of these cables. i also noticed a small increase in app. performance.

so useing these cables for me made the system more stable and improved system speed slightly.

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about time i change this, i spend about 4 hours a day reading the posts on this site and get paid to do it ,now isin't that a great job? oh you want pain how about this halflife works on the nt machine at work but as soon as you patch it to the latest version it dies a horible winblows nt4 death of dll errors.

**agallag** · 5 August 1999, 14:22

It would almost be worth it to get a cheap adaptec scsi card (2920 pci is pretty good and not much $) and get a scsi burner. If you're not going to do much burning, it's probably overkill, but you'd definitely make fewer coasters

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Andrew Gallagher - andrew@agallagher.com
Asus P2B-S, PII-350, 64MB PC100, 12.7GB Quantum Fireball EX ATA-33, 3.2GB IBM Deskstar3 EIDE, 2x2.1GB Quantum Atlas I UWSCSI, Toshiba 6201 SCSI CD, Yamaha CRW4416S SCSI CD-RW, WangDAT SCSI, MillG200 8MB, SBLive! Retail (Plugged into a JVC RX884V Dolby Digital Receiver@500W), Win98SE

[This message has been edited by agallag (edited 08-05-99).]

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