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General discussion

optimum ide cable setup for new dvd drive?

Oct 26, 2004 2:53PM PDT

hello,

I just got my first DVD drive and I'm wondering how i should hook up the drives on the IDE cables. the manual said to put the DVD drive as a secondary master (which I did), but it had no advice on how to hook up a system w/ 2 hard drives. it said to put a CD rom drive as secondary slave, but I don't have a 2nd CD/optical drive. so where should I put the second HD? right now I have the second Hdrive as primary slave.

note I am running premiere (win2000, abit va-10 mobo) so the video data is on the second Hdrive mostly-- so i thought it might be better to have it on the secondary slave ide. how do drives share data on the same ide cable anyway??

thanks! - fj

Discussion is locked

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In a nutshell. . .
Oct 26, 2004 4:20PM PDT

Put the two HDs on the primary controller. Master on the end of the cable, slave on the middle plug. Put the optical on the secondary controller. Set it as master in the end if the cable. When you get ready for your high speed CD-RW drive put on the middle plug and set it as slave.

Then, if you're like me, you can add a PCI controller card and connect four more drives.

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Re: optimum ide cable setup for new dvd drive?
Oct 26, 2004 10:59PM PDT

The instructions are really irrelevant as long as you have equally capable IDE controllers on your sytsem.

Your best speed, would be to put the hard drives on opposite controllers, they way they have independent access and are not dependent on what the other drive is doing when you are using both drives heavily.

You can connect CD drives any way you wish, but you need to check the current jumpers used with your motherboard, almost all newer systems (2 years or less) use Cable Select (CS) for both drives on the cable, you don't use Maser/Slave settings.

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re: cable select
Oct 27, 2004 2:16AM PDT

hi, sorry I should have said, I am using "cable select" jumpers on the drives and assigning them their roles using the cables.

so you think I should put the DVD (as master) on secondary ide cable, and the 2nd hard drive on that cable as secondary slave?

I guess the two options here are, putting the two hard drives on separate channels makes for better functioning while editing etc., but would be better to have the DVD alone on secondary ide cable while burning . . . what to do? what to do?
- fj

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I do not believe that Jeff said
Oct 27, 2004 5:07AM PDT

to make the second HDD as the slave on the secondary. make it the Master IMHO. And as I indicated in my post, SOYO said that the DVD MUST be the slave [on either controller], at least for their mobos.

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liteon wants to be master
Oct 27, 2004 9:21AM PDT

so I have to leave the dvd on the 2-ide master.

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I have a SOYO mobo that will NOT
Oct 26, 2004 11:53PM PDT

recognize a DVD drive on the Master [confirmed via email to Soyo].

I have it as a slave [using CS] on the secondary IDE port [nothing on the master which is not good practice, but it works fine],

If I put it on the master it stops during boot and reports "not an ATAPI device".

Thus I can only put it as slave on either the Primary or Secondary IDE controller.