3 Hard drives, CD, & CD-RW. Configure?

[Dinosaur]

I am currently building a system with 3 physical drives. I intend to do the following and would welcome any advice, comments, et cetera.

I intend to have the OS (probably Windows 98) and the mostly commonly used software on one drive. All data files and less commonly used software on another drive. The virtual memory OS swap file on the third drive. I expect to minimize head movement by this arrangement. I expect this to save some time and result in longer life for the head mechanisms. Does this seem like a good idea? Will the system run faster? I expect it to, but do not really expect to be able to notice or measure the increase in speed. Any thoughts on this?

If an I/O operation crosses tracks does it necessarily require head movement. Id Est: Do modern disks have more than one read/write head on a platter?

On each drive, I intend to have several small partitions which will contain copies of various CD applications. I expect to avoid changing CD's by having a dictionary, an atlas, some games and various other CD applications on hard drives at all times. Do any of you have experience doing this? Any advice?

Two of the drives will share an IDE connector. Note one drive has OS, one has data files, and one has swap file. Which drive should share an IDE connector with the Drive containing the OS and the more often used software.? Does it matter?

Can Windows 98 and a modern BIOS provide concurrent I/O for two hard drives? I know that mainframes have done this for 30 or more years. If a PC can do this, I assume that the concurrent I/O must be from drives on separate connectors.

My ASUS A7V133 motherboard has 4 IDE connectors, and the manual is somewhat confusing. Further more, my vendor and have some language problems. I am not certain that the two pairs of connectors are equivalent. I assume that they are.

My problem is that I am not sure how to assign three hard drives, a CD reader, and a CD-RW to the four connectors. Perhaps I should put each hard drive on a separate connector and have the CD and CD-RW share the fourth connector. Perhaps I should put two hard drives on one connector as primary & slave, with the third drive on another connector, allowing the CD & CD-RW to be alone on third and fourth connectors. Does anybody have advice on this? Can a CD and CD-RW share an IDE connector the way master and slave hard drives share a connector?

I am also querying the motherboard manufacturer. While I have had good experiences with ASUS motherboards, the last time I used tried asking them for help, there were communication problems. I wish I spoke a few oriental languages, so we could communicate better.

Any thoughts, advice, comments on hard drive organization will be appreciated.

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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.

[Paleo Pete]

I might be able to answer part of your questions...probably not all

Don't think you'll be able to use 5 drives on 4 connnectors. I had to look up the board to be sure, but it has 2 IDE channels, one UDMA cable and one IDE cable come with it. Each has two connectors, so you'll be limited to 4 drives total. Some people have had problems with CD-R and CD drives on the same channel, you might have to do some swapping around to get everything to work.

Usually it's best to put CD drives on a separate channel from IDE drives, since the CD will slow down the system if put on the same channel as the hard drive.

Tracks: Tracks are laid out on a hard drive just like the songs on a vinyl record. Head movement will be required to get from one track to another. Sectors are individual pieces of the tracks, viewed from the top it looks like a sliced pizza, cut into several rings. Cylinders are a vertical group of tracks, each track in the same position on each platter comprises part of a cylinder. I don't know if modern drives use multiple heads per platter or not. As far as I know, traditionally it's been one head per platter per side.

Due to the size of most modern programs and applications, I seriously doubt if any one program will be confined to one track. Some won't even be confined to one platter...I would say defrag after every application you install, to try and keep things orderly...

As a side note, I usually try to check out everything I install for a day or so before installing anything else. That avoids problems trying to figure out what caused trouble later, as compared to installing everything at one time and having no idea where your troubles started...

Swap file should be on it's own partition, usually thought to be best on a separate drive, performance difference won't be noticable. Defrag the partition, reboot then move the swap file there. Should never need defragging again. (Windows won't defrag the swap file anyway, since it's in use.) Applications on separate drives probably won't make any difference in performance either, but will help keep free space on C drive. I don't limit my swap file to a particular size, windows does that fairly well. Mine is on a 700MB partition, and I haven't had any problems at all. Machine is a P-233MMX with 64MB RAM. I've never seen the swap file larger than about 50MB so far.

My best guess for configuration, and you might still have to swap things a bit:
Hard drives-Master & Slave, Primary IDE.
CD; CD-RW Master, Slave Secondary IDE. CD-RW might have to be swapped to Master, only way to know how your board will act is try it.

The only way I see to get 5 drives is to go with SCSI, which will support up to 7 devices per channel. Then you'll have to go SCSI all the way, mixing it with IDE often causes boot problems.

Specs on the board are Here (http://www.asus.com/products/motherboard/socketa/a7v133/spec.html) so other folks can check them without having to search, and if I missed anything or just plain blew it, let me know.



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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
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[Dinosaur]

Paleo Pete: Thanx for your thoughts. You gave me some good ideas.

FYI: The Motherboard I have has two pairs of IDE connectors, allowing up to 8 IDE devices (I think) if I put a master and slave on each connection. At any rate, I am sure that I can put three drives on one pair (A Master/Slave and a StandAlone), and put a CD device on each connector of the other pair.

I am not sure. I hope you are wrong, but suspect you are right about putting two CD devices on one connector as master and slave. I intend to do some further research on this. I do not intend to use the CD devices concurrently, so perhaps they can share a connector. With luck, problems only occur when you try to use them concurrently.



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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.

[Paleo Pete]

Maybe the specs I looked up are for a different board, but I just looked again...

IDE Ports
2 x UltraDMA/100 (Promise® ATA-100)

I can't see any others in the picture either, but it's not a very large one, so maybe they're there...Anyway...

If it does have 4 IDE channels, you could set up 2 drives on the Primary IDE, one on the next, and one CD drive on each of the others and it should work out OK. You'd still be able to put a 4th hard drive on the second IDE channel, without putting it together with a CD and slowing it down.

For your sake I hope I'm wrong too, but the specs I see say it won't happen, I see only two IDE channels.


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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[bassman]

Hey Dino and Pete,
Pete, I think it's time to upgrade from the monochrome monitor http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/eek.gif Just kiddin.
I can see two blue connections (udma?) and right next to them, two black. The specs don't say there are four connections but they are there. There is also a floppy plug so I'm not confusing that.
I guess a read thru of an understandable manual would help, but like you said, yours is very confusing.
If I'm not mistaken Randy is familiar with these boards so maybe he will pick up on this with more info.
good luck

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If a book about Failures doesn't sell, is it a success?

[sleddog]

There are four connector all right but unless I'm mistaken you can't use them all at the same time. For example, if you use the ATA 100 ones you can't use the others at the same time. My A7V has the same layout -- I'll check the mobo manual on this tonight when I get home.

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sleddog
[sleddog.f2s.com] (http://www.sleddog.f2s.com)

[Dinosaur]

Gee, fellows I tried to keep this query simple by not mentioning that my system has two pairs of IDE connectors (total 4 connectors), allowing for up to 8 IDE devices if I put a master and slave device on each connector. I intend to have 5 IDE devices.

The planned configuration is a CD-ROM and a CD-RW on the second pair of connectors, and three 20 GB drives on the first pair of connectors.

My Motherboard supports RAID-0, but my I/O tends to involve lots of small records rather than huge graphic files, film editing, streaming video files, et cetera. Without synchronized spindles, RAID-0 would make data transfers faster but would increase latency time, resulting in perhaps little overall gain in speed and possibly a slower system. There are other drawbacks to RAID if it does not really suit your applications.

I do not intend to dedicate an entire disk to the Swap file. What I want to do is minimize Disc head movement, which takes milliseconds and decreases the life of the disc due to extra mechanical activity.

My thoughts about the drive organization is as follows.
Windows 98 and major software on first physical disc.
All (or most) data files on second physical disc with less used software.
Swap files and backup on third physical disc.
Various CD applications in small partitions on all three discs, cutting down on requirements for changing CD's.

I am not sure which two discs should share an IDE connector. Perhaps it does not matter.

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Gouverneur
Eschew Obfuscation!
If one hundred million people believe a foolish idea, it is still a foolish idea.

[Paleo Pete]

OK, maybe I didn't look close enough, I thought the two black connectors were floppy and LPT...forgot the LPT was on the edge too, and maybe the shadows in the pic fooled me...

Anyway I would put the primary drive on IDE 1, the other two on IDE 2, and CD drives on the others, assuming you can use all four at once.

And let's try to keep this computer in this topic instead of scattering it all over the place, I think I've seen 3 topics so far concerning this board. Soon as I figure out which is which all but this one will be locked, I think it was the original.

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Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines!
Note: Please post your questions on the forums, not in my email.

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[helldiverCDN]

Forget the third drive.

You did not say what amount of RAM you have. I would get extra RAM instead ( i.e 256MB / 512 MB ) Depending on your apps, you may not even need the swap file.

If required, just setup a small swap on the second drive, if any app needs it ( i.e. for games ).

Cheers,

hell out