IDE configuration questions

[plastic]

I am going to be building a PC DAW shortly. I'll be starting off with two IDE drives due to budget. When istalling the drives, I know I'll be installing one hard drive to IDE channel 1 and the other to IDE channel 2. Would it better to then install the cd and cdrw drives as slaves to the hard drives or to install a PCI IDE interface card to run the cd drives without slaving them to the hard drives?

[Umbra]

You want to set it up so there is a minimal amount of use on any ide channel that contains a hard drive by whatever else is on there.

So, if your not going to use the cd drives much your probably not going to see any difference between the two setups. Best approach would be the seperate card BUT this may cause you IRQ conflicts with other things.

In general I don't think it's worth the extra money and the headache to deal with the extra card for the minimal amount of difference it would make. Just get good 7200 rpm drives with large cache's on them, best choice is western digital's drive that has the 8mb cache on it if you can find it (they are also fairly expensive compared to regular drives). These drives bench mark at about the speed of an average 10,000 rpm SCSI drive.

Good luck,

[wetwareinterface]

actually i'd avoid the western digital drives. the 8 megs of cache is nice but thats on their 120/180 gig drives to try to compensate for the long seek times. they actually benchmark and perform like shit. their burst cahracteristics are fine due to the 8 meg cache but their sustained throughput numbers plain suck ass, and when doing audio recording that is what you will be wanting. ibm deskstars have great sustained throughput as do the maxtor diamond max plus drives. seagate makes a specialized 10,000 rpm ide drive that cost $$$, and their 7,200 ide isn't too shabby. i'd go with the ibm or the diamond max plus instead though.

[wetwareinterface]

also if your doing audio recording your not gonna be using your cd-rom at the same time more than likely. so youcould do this setup.....


primary master 1st hard drive
primary slave 1st cd-rom

secondary master 2nd hard drive
secondary slave 2nd cd-rom


also most motherboards come with a raid or extra ide controller if yours does then do this....

primary master 1st hard drive
secondary master 1st cd-rom
extra ide primary master 2nd hard drive
extra ide secondary master 2nd cd-rom.

the reason you put the at least one cd-rom on the chipsets built in ide controller is so you can boot from cd-rom. most bios setups let you boot from an alternate controller but the cd-rom boot most times fails from there as the bios looks to a cd-rom on the chipsets internal ide ports and then quits looking. it wants a hard drive on the extra controller to boot from.

[Umbra]

I disagree with the response about the 8mb cache WD drives, they have the lowest average cpu usage of almost any drive, one of the highest burst rates, above average seek times, and a sustain rate well above average. Toms Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com) rated it a best buy even given it's fairly high price for an IDE drive. I think you may have it confused with another drive.

As far as raid goes stay away from a mirrored raid system, you might get a speed boost with some of the other types of raid however, but you increase your risk of data loss due to disk failure unless you have a good backup scheme going.

The gain your going to get over the average run of the mill 7200 rpm drive by doing any of these things is probably not worth it anyway, maybe something along the scale of 1-3% speed boost. You can get much better benefits by buying the right motherboard, optimizing the OS and not installing a bunch of junk.

[wetwareinterface]

Originally posted by Umbra
I disagree with the response about the 8mb cache WD drives, they have the lowest average cpu usage of almost any drive, one of the highest burst rates, above average seek times, and a sustain rate well above average. Toms Hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com) rated it a best buy even given it's fairly high price for an IDE drive. I think you may have it confused with another drive.

As far as raid goes stay away from a mirrored raid system, you might get a speed boost with some of the other types of raid however, but you increase your risk of data loss due to disk failure unless you have a good backup scheme going.

The gain your going to get over the average run of the mill 7200 rpm drive by doing any of these things is probably not worth it anyway, maybe something along the scale of 1-3% speed boost. You can get much better benefits by buying the right motherboard, optimizing the OS and not installing a bunch of junk.

if you'd go and re-read what i posted youd notice that i said their seek times are bad but the 8 meg cache is there to help it out. it also has good burst transfers due to the 8 meg cache. this is great for average desktop/operating system tasks. when you record audio and lay down multi tracks your gonna wish you had an ibm deskstar or maxtor instead. they have higher sustained throughput figures which is critical for gaining extra tracks of audio in multi i/o daw systems. which is why for a daw i said stear clear of of the western digital drives. for a primary master to run windows/software off of it would make a fine choice given its large size and 8 meg cache. just not for the second audio only drive.