Master and Slave Clarification

[JRussell1388]

This may be an obvious question... but I just wanted to make sure

If you have a Hard Drive, a DVD-RW drive, and a regular CD drive...

would you want to set the HD to Master... and the other two Optical Drives as slaves??

Or would the HD be the Master... and the DVD be a Master to the regular CD drive (set as a slave)

[Hagar]

With PATA you typically have two IDE cables (called Primary and Secondary). On each cable you can have two devices, called Master and Slave.
In most cases it should not matter how you connect this, but it may depend on the PC. Sometimes there can be problems booting from a slave CD.

I would have the HDD as Master on the Primary, and the two optical drives as Master and Slave on the Secondary. That is usually the most convenient way to arrange the cables.

[JRussell1388]

With PATA you typically have two IDE cables (called Primary and Secondary). On each cable you can have two devices, called Master and Slave.
In most cases it should not matter how you connect this, but it may depend on the PC. Sometimes there can be problems booting from a slave CD.

I would have the HDD as Master on the Primary, and the two optical drives as Master and Slave on the Secondary. That is usually the most convenient way to arrange the cables.



Thanks!

That's kind of along the lines of what I figured the plan would be, thanks and for the help!

[kiosk]

Also, if you're building a new computer, don't go with PATA; it has been obsoleted by SATA (which does away with cumbersome master/slave arrangements entirely).

[Paul Komski]

would you want to set the HD to Master... and the other two Optical Drives as slaves??

Or would the HD be the Master... and the DVD be a Master to the regular CD drive (set as a slave)
On PATA setups, the exact arrangement of devices is a matter for each individual to choose. All compatible ATA/ATAPI devices can be placed in any of the usual four positions. On older systems you may only be able to boot from a HDD in the primary master position. There are pro's and cons, in terms of performance, as to the exact way devices are mixed (and this is a very old debate) but in general you are best to have one optical as master and have the other on the other channel (particularly if you are going to be doing any disk to disk copying) and the same goes for multiple hard drives on a system. This is not written is stone and the best arrangement will depend on how one is using the devices and what has the greatest priority since the system can only read and write from one of two devices on the same cable at a time.

One of the reasons for SATAs being preferred is that this master-slave affect on individulal device performance is negated.

[Sylvander]

If you fit a PCI to IDE controller card [they don't cost much]...

You would then have 4 IDE controllers and could fit each drive as master on its own controller [put an end to slavery, make every drive free!]

WHY?
Because then each drive could run concurrently.
e.g. That would mean that if you were copying one optical disk to another, the reader and burner could both be doing their jobs at the same time.
And if any of that data flow needed to go via the HDD, that could also be doing its job at the same time.