Re: System Speed Compromise

Maverick wrote on 7/14/2003, 8:06 AM
Hi All

Since purchasing my DVD+-RW I have had a few problems in connecting all my devices.

I have an ABIT KR7A-RAID MB on which I have the Bootable (ATA 133) HDD on IDE 1 and two ATA 133 HDDs on IDE 4 as master/slave. IDEs 3 & 4 are the HighPoint connectors.

It seems I can only connect the DVD+-RW on its own so that it happy on IDE 2 and IDE 3 & 4 cannot have ATAPI devices connected.

So I have connected the DVD-ROM as slave to HDD0 on IDE1.

Although I use Vegas 4 for all my editing I still have Studio 7 so I used this for checking the speed of HDD0 and found that it could only sustain a speed of 2250 whereas HDD1 & 2 reach almost 50000.

My question is this - will having the DVD-ROM as slave to the bootable disc which only contains the System and programs compromise the overal speed of my configuration?

Anyadvice would be helpful.

Cheers

Comments

mikkie wrote on 7/14/2003, 12:27 PM
Problem with anything IDE UDMA, the speed of both devices on a channel can be limited by the slower of the two, so a drive capable of UDMA5 or 6 might be limited to match a UDMA 4 drive on the same channel. In my experience, how much so depends on the motherboard, using cable select, and the individual devices. I try to keep my CD/DVD drives away from the hard drives, on their own channel (s), but even then they can interact with each other - this seems to depend on brand and such so can't predict what will happen [swapped cdrw drives with another machine, and dvd-rom drive speed dropped dramatically, though windows still shows udma4]

If it's the only solution to get your drive speed back, try adding a promise IDE pci card for the DVDROM. Less efficient but more isolated and cheap.
Maverick wrote on 7/14/2003, 1:50 PM
Will using Cable Select give a more optimised performance on each drive over the Master/Slave configuration?

What I still don't understand is why DMA is showing for the ATAPI device but not the HDD.

Cheers
mikkie wrote on 7/14/2003, 5:56 PM
"Will using Cable Select give a more optimised performance on each drive over the Master/Slave configuration"

*might* but this is kind of uncharted territory I've seen debated at some gameing sites.

"What I still don't understand is why DMA is showing for the ATAPI device but not the HDD."

Windows is kind of screwy handling udma... In 98 & 98 SE, might have to enable it in device mgr 6 or 7 times before it sticks! In xp pro sp1, if you have a prob. or if it thinks you have a prob, it will disable it! All you can do is play with the registry, or safer, delete the ide channel or change the driver to something else, and on reboot put things back. That's if things are working cool. It could also be the drive messing with your HDD, and/or your M/board.

Personally, to give you an idea, I've got a 16x DVD ROM drive - works at 16 x DVD, & 40 something CD if I recall. I was given a Liteon CDRW that was faster then my LG workhorse. I measure ~ 5 or 6x from the DVD ROM since. Windows likes to degrade it to PIO only, which makes DVD playback very poor - I keep a canned reg file handy to set it back to udma 4. One of these days I'll get P-O'd and try a few more configurations, but everything so far hurt somewhere else.