Stuart McLachlan
stuart at lexacorp.com.pg
Sun Mar 5 00:31:14 CST 2006
On 4 Mar 2006 at 22:33, Arthur Fuller wrote: > Thanks for the detailed explanation and recipe! > Your last comment struck me particularly, since I was told precisely the > opposite by somebody. Not to say you or he is right, but what he said was, > "The best way to lay it out is both HDs as masters, and your CD-burner and > DVD-burner as slaves. That way, you can enter the BIOS at bootup and choose > which master to boot." I know so little about this stuff that I am not even > sure your position differs from his. > It gets quite complicate, but one key factor is "There are several reasons why optical drives (or other ATAPI devices) should not be shared on the same channel as a fast hard disk. ATAPI allows the use of the same physical channels as IDE/ATA, but it is not the same protocol; ATAPI uses a much more complicated command structure. Opticals are also generally much slower devices than hard disks, so they can slow a hard disk down when sharing a channel." See http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_Performance.htm for all the gory details and http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/confRecommendations.ht ml for recommended configurations in different situations. -- Stuart