Re: IDE, controller, ????

On Thu, 27 Apr 2006 14:11:46 -0400, "Orv" <pcbidder@(flipflops)hotmal.com> wrote:

Then I noticed I put a SCSI card (PCI slot ..giving me 2 more IDE slots) to
which I have the WinXp hard drive as master and the Maxtor hardrive as
slave. Nothing on the 2nd IDE.

I guess this explains the long time for the partitioner, huh?
My next question, although not sure if this is the right group is this:

If I move the cable (with the DVDrw and the CDrw) from primary IDE to the
2nd IDE (on mb) and then move the cable (with the hard drives) from the pci
card to the primary IDE (on the mb) will it boot normally? Do I risk messing
up my WinXp hard drive?

No, you winxp is on a master, leave it there. Try to always put
hard drives as master at the end of the IDE cable, that's where the
best electrical signal is. Running modern CD/DVD as slave device is
okay as they use slower udma2 which caters for the lower quality
electrical signal on the slave connector. Always use 18" length
cables, that's the spec.

Technical: IDE signal drive is source (mobo) terminated, the
signal travels down the cable at half voltage, hits the high
impedance end and jumps back up to full voltage. What also
happens is that a nasty signal reflection bounces back from
the end of the cable due to impedance mismatch. So the master
device sees healthy full signal, while the slave device sees
a lower signal plus the reflected signal, not good. Running
the slave at slower data clock rate lets it ignore the reflected
signal.

Beware older IDE devices (example: Iomega ATAPI Zip drive) that
kill hard drive on same cable.

What often happens with a slave HDD is that is stuffs up a data CRC
due to poor signal, then linux-kernel downgrades to PIO (very slow)
I/O to that device to avoid dataloss.

The other problem with IDE is that a device cannot release the bus,
so if you place two hard drives on same cable, access to one is locked
while the other is busy seeking. In contrast, SCSI devices release
the bus while busy, therefore much faster.

For best performance try to setup so CD/DVD talks to HDD on the other
IDE cable.

I think once I straighten this out, loading Debian won't be a problem. For
the life of me I don't know why I threw the scsi pci card in there let alone
connect the hard drives to it and not the motherboard.

Stuff happens ;) I use SATA for new boxen as it is better interface
than IDE.

Grant.
--
Memory fault -- brain fried
.

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