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Questions about sharing ide cable with dvd and cd-rw...

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Questions about sharing ide cable with dvd and cd-rw...

Postby Loop on Sat Apr 05, 2003 3:29 pm

I just recently built my very first computer (im 17 :)) and my friend told me that since my ide cable is shared with the dvd and cd-rw, my burning speed for cd to cd copying is going to be slower since it has to go to the motherboard and back to the cd-rw.

Is this true? And how much performance impact are we talking about? 30secs? 15secs?

Thanks,
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Re: Questions about sharing ide cable with dvd and cd-rw...

Postby BuddhaTB on Sat Apr 05, 2003 3:57 pm

Loop wrote:I just recently built my very first computer (im 17 :)) and my friend told me that since my ide cable is shared with the dvd and cd-rw, my burning speed for cd to cd copying is going to be slower since it has to go to the motherboard and back to the cd-rw.

This is in fact true. If your planning on doing a lot of cd to cd copying, I would place your dvd-rom on your primary IDE cable (the one the hard drive is hooked up to). Make sure to set the jumper on the dvd-rom to slave. This will greatly help you out when doing cd to cd copying. In terms of the how much time you'll save, I'll say its more than 30 seconds depending on how fast your cd-rw drive is.
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Postby burninfool on Sat Apr 05, 2003 3:59 pm

Yes your friend is correct.The best way to set up your drives for "on-the-fly"copying is have primary HDD set as master on primary IDE channel and DVD-ROM(or CD-ROM) as slave.CD-R/W(or DVD) writer as master on secondary channel and second HDD as slave(optional).
You might have to switch drives around to find what works best on your system.
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Postby buchan2 on Sat Apr 05, 2003 4:59 pm

Just my 2 cents but putting a cd or DVD device on the same bus as your primary HD will cause that bus to slow to the speed of the CD device won't it?

This means that your HD won't be able to run at a full ATA100 or whatever ...
This would slow down the rest of the system wouldn't it ? Most cd/dvd devices only use ata66 as a transfer speed right ???

Please correct me if I'm worng but I thought that was the way that worked.
I'm going to have a look at some stuff when I reboot this machine and get back to you with what I see...

ok ... I can't tell what speed things are running at here but does someone else know the answer to this question ??
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Postby BuddhaTB on Sat Apr 05, 2003 5:16 pm

buchan2 wrote:Just my 2 cents but putting a cd or DVD device on the same bus as your primary HD will cause that bus to slow to the speed of the CD device won't it?

This means that your HD won't be able to run at a full ATA100 or whatever ...
This would slow down the rest of the system wouldn't it ? Most cd/dvd devices only use ata66 as a transfer speed right ???

Please correct me if I'm worng but I thought that was the way that worked.
I'm going to have a look at some stuff when I reboot this machine and get back to you with what I see...

ok ... I can't tell what speed things are running at here but does someone else know the answer to this question ??


Read the following two threads. Having a dvd-rom hooked up to the same IDE channel as your hard drive won't slow down your system or transfer speeds if both are using UDMA to transfer the data. If you don't know how to enable UDMA or not sure if its enable, please check out the FAQ section.
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=6648
http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=3032
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Postby cfitz on Sat Apr 05, 2003 5:24 pm

@Loop:

All data being transfered from IDE device to IDE device has to go back to motherboard and out again regardless of how you have the devices configured. You had the right idea, but wrong reason.

Even the right idea isn't 100% right. Putting the source and destination drives on the same IDE channel won't necessarily slow down your burn for an on-the-fly copy. However, it isn't recommended if you intend to do a lot of on-the-fly copying because depending on your device and controller speeds it may do so.

There is no one "correct" configuration for everyone. The general rule of thumb for best performance is to have the source and destination drives (whatever they may be, CD-RW, DVD-ROM or hard drive) on separate IDE channels. Thus, if you won't be doing on-the-fly copying but will be doing a lot of copying from the CD-RW to hard drive and from the DVD-ROM to hard drive, then you ought to put the two optical drives on the same IDE channel, separate from the hard drive's channel.

@Buchan2:

While it was once true that putting a slow IDE device on a channel would force the channel to operate at that slow device's rate, it is no longer true with modern controllers and devices that support independent device timing.

@Everyone:

All of these issues are addressed in this thread and many more:

http://www.cdrlabs.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=9852

Try a search next time. :-? 8)

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Postby buchan2 on Sat Apr 05, 2003 5:44 pm

see ... I knew I was wrong .... :oops: :roll:
sorry cfitz
I read this and it said that the search was broken
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Postby cfitz on Sat Apr 05, 2003 7:11 pm

buchan2 wrote:I read this and it said that the search was broken

It's not completely broken, and that link gives some tips for making it work better even though it does have problems. By the way, my suggestion wasn't specifically directed at you. It was a general plea.

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Postby Loop on Sun Apr 06, 2003 12:46 am

My ide cable is too short to be shared with the hdd....is this normal?
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Postby cfitz on Sun Apr 06, 2003 12:52 am

Loop wrote:My ide cable is too short to be shared with the hdd....is this normal?

It isn't uncommon. Hard drives on some machines are simply located too far away from the 5 inch expansion bays for an 18" IDE cable to reach both.

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Postby Loop on Sun Apr 06, 2003 9:37 pm

cfitz wrote:
Loop wrote:My ide cable is too short to be shared with the hdd....is this normal?

It isn't uncommon. Hard drives on some machines are simply located too far away from the 5 inch expansion bays for an 18" IDE cable to reach both.

cfitz



So am I screwed? :)
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Postby cfitz on Sun Apr 06, 2003 10:15 pm

No. You could put the two optical drives together on the same channel if you don't intend to do much on-the-fly copying (in fact that would be better under those circumstances). And even if you do intend to do lots of on-the-fly copying, you still might be able to manage it with both optical drives on the same channel if they and your controller use sufficiently fast transfer modes. Experiment and see. Finally, you could buy an additional IDE controller card. Here are some to check out:

Promise:
Ultra66 - $23
Ultra100 - $29
Ultra133 - $36

Siig:
Ultra66 - $21
Ultra100 - $28
Ultra133 - $38

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Postby NightFlyer on Wed Apr 09, 2003 2:40 am

Due to the way my system is configured with two hard drives, my Lite-On DVD drive and Teac 40X CD-R both share the secondary IDE in my system. This has had zero effect on my being able to burn on-the-fly copies at full 40x speed of either data or audio discs.

Motherboard: Asus CUV-4X, 768MB ram, 1Ghz P3 cpu
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Postby cfitz on Wed Apr 09, 2003 9:20 am

Yes, it is possible if the drives and controller use fast enough DMA modes. It is just that given a choice, putting the drives on separate channels is the recommended configuration if you want to do a lot of on-the-fly copying. It is more likely to give good results for more people that way. I hope I was clear in my earlier posts. And thanks for reporting your experience to demonstrate that it is possible.

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Postby CDRecorder on Thu Apr 10, 2003 12:50 am

What I would do is put the burner and the DVD on the same IDE cable and copy a disc on-the-fly. While it's burning, watch the buffer level of the burner (your burning software should show this). If it doesn't ever get too low, your performance isn't suffering at all, and your configuration is fine.

BTW, I keep the burner and the CD-ROM drive on the same IDE cable in the machine I built a couple years ago, but I never burn on-the-fly.
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Postby NightFlyer on Thu Apr 10, 2003 4:21 am

Just a quick note - When I do watch burn process, both the software buffer AND burner always stay absolutely full.

I used to keep a very close eye on this when the IDE burner was installed, as I burn a lot of audio.

Lite-On LTD-163 is the master, Teac CD-W540E is the slave in my configuration.

Cheers
-BT
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