So basically, hook it up however it bothers you the least. But no one has yet conclusively proven to me in day-to-day use that it actually makes a difference.
Yet, I have heard many opinions and suggestions to the contrary, saying that HDD performance drops if any other slower unit is in the same cable.Fine, then it just means we're all screwed until Serial ATA finally reaches a store near us.
So, go for RAID if you want, but I doubt you really need it.Īs for how to hook up the disks, I used to think that one HDD per channel is best, and the CD-R as slave for the second disk is best.
There is no application I know of that demands more of all the components of a PC than real-time video capturing, and IDE (ATA 100) is perfectly up to the task. For capturing, I have a Pinnacle DC10 PCI card. The rig I used to capture is an AMD XP 1600+ with 512DDR266, a single 80Mb Seagate HDD and an ASUS mainboard. I have just lately finished capturing and encoding an hour worth of VCR film I made a few weeks ago, and without RAID everything worked satisfactorily. Yet, I have yet to find a real reason for installing it. If the reverse configuration is preferred, then you will need to purchase a PCI Ultra ATA controller.RAID in itself seems to be good (for performance), if I base my opinion on this article. You can leave the drives in the working configuration and transfer the necessary data from the original drive (now slave) to the new master drive. If the drives work in this configuration, there is a decision to be made. Jumper changes will be necessary on both drives. If the new drive works fine as a stand alone and fails as a slave, try bringing it up as the master with the original drive as the slave. If you have determined that both ATA drives are jumpered correctly for master/slave and they still do not work, try to bring the new drive up as a stand alone or single drive. Different BIOSs and ATA controllers can impact this. Normally the newer drive will need to be the master. Both hard drives will need a DC power connection. Make sure pin 1 on the ribbon cable is pointing towards pin 1 on both hard drives and also on the ATA controller card connector. The ATA ribbon cable has a marking along one edge. Set the jumpers on the other drive to the slave setting. If one of your drives was made by another manufacturer, you will need to contact that manufacturer for master/slave jumper settings on that drive. Two ATA drives physically on two separate ribbon cables are not master/slave and are jumpered independently.ĭetermine which drive is the master and make sure it is jumpered correctly. It is usually designated as the D: drive. The drive jumpered as the non-boot drive is the slave drive. The drive jumpered as the boot drive is the C: or master drive. Two ATA drives physically plugged into the same 40-pin/80-conductor ribbon cable are paired in a master/slave set up.
One ATA (IDE) drive on the ribbon cable is referred to as a single drive. Depending on your computer and the existing hard drive, setting master/slave may be useful. Setting master or slave is an alternate method to cable select. Current UltraATA cables with the 3 colored connectors do support this feature. For the cable select setting to work properly, the cables you are using must support the cable select feature. SATA drives have one cable per drive.ĪTA drives are configured at the factory for a cable select setting and is the recommend configuration on most computer setups. This allows the drive to assume the proper role of master or slave based on the connector used on the cable. This does not apply to Serial ATA drives (SATA). Discusses proper cabling and jumper settings for ATA/IDE drives.