Help on hard drives ! Dealer awaits my answer...

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Sun Mar 17, 2002 8:49 pm

Following advice in the tech forum my new P4 Asus P4B266 PC will be using two hard drives, both Barracudas. The question is how should I tell them to configure them ? I told them 20Gb as primary and 80Gb as secondary, but they have replied that they think this is weird and where should the CD burner go ?

This is what they say:

Are you sure that you want the little hard drive to be the primary and the
big one secondary?
how about the writer?
or rather do you want primary master to be the big HDD and small one primary
slave and then the CD writer will run as secondary master?

This is beyond me. What should I tell them ?

thanks

Valium · Post by **Valium** » Sun Mar 17, 2002 8:55 pm

Hi there,

well as for the two hard drives being first or second, in my opinion the small one should be the primary for OS and Apps, and the bigger one should be the secundary one were you store all your audiofiles, samples, etc. The logic behind it is that you'll get lot's and lot's of data and samples to store and manage, but the apps and OS won't grow nor change that much. So you can backup your OS/Apps drive easily on to the much larger second driver.

As for how they should be devided on the ide channels I don't think that matter's so much. But since there's a CD-Burner coming in with the hd's I think you should put the small OS HD as primary master, the big Audio HD as secundary master and the CD-Burner as secundary slave.

Hope this helps you

Greetz

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Sun Mar 17, 2002 11:26 pm

Ok, I think the way to go is:

20Gb primary master
80Gb secondary master
CDRW primary slave

For future reference here is a link about IDE drives with DAWs that helped (& thanks Valium):
http://members.optushome.com.au/skinah/ ... e.htm#late

[ This Message was edited by: Spirit on 2002-03-18 00:41 ]

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 8:42 am

I think Valium got a very good point. Actually I never thought of this option as fruitfull, but here it goes.

Chances are, you will never realy use your burner at the same time as your *music drive* (md). It is good to have active drives on seperate IDE chanels, because a IDE chanel can only do one thing at a time (read something or write something). Therefor, you will have a realy good solution with

OS pri master
md sec master
CD sec slave

- with XP that is. Because XP seems to be able to mix IDE/ATA speeds on each IDE chanel. Therefor your CD will not slow down your md. Win98 however can not do this trick, so here it would be best to have

OS pri master
CD pri slave
md sec master

Your md is the one, that needs the speed the most.

Immanuel

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 8:44 am

oh, and by the way. 2ms seek times is a thing of the future (I scanned your link).

Immanuel

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 3:35 pm

Good point, but the CDRW will usually be burning material that is on the secondary drive, so wouldn't it be better to have the burner as primary slave ?

bassdude · Post by **bassdude** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 4:23 pm

Hello spirit,

Because they are both the same brand of drive and same speed (i'm assuming), I would go with:-
20GB OS Primary IDE Master
80GB Data Primary IDE Slave
CDrom Secondary IDE Primary/Slave whatever.

The reason is, IDE cannot do simultaneous read/write regardless of spreading drives across IDE controllers (it doesn't work like SCSI) E.G.-
Read from IDE1, Write to IDE2 - does not occur simultaneously, rather it will read first from hardrive on ide1 and then write to harddrive on ide2 then go back to ide1, read a bit more then write to ide2 etc, etc.

The addition of an extra ide controller is pretty much only to facilitate connection of extra devices to get around the 2 devices on one ide.

The people building your computer should know this.

PS, someone please correct me if i'm wrong.

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 5:05 pm

Yeah, this is basically what they suggested (except having the 80Gb as master). I've already told then to go with the configuration above. I don't want to stuff them around so unless someone thinks this is actually a BAD config I suppose I'll leave it at that .....

It'd be useful to have this hard drive config stuff added to the list of DAW suggestions.

In fact is there a comprehensive DAW thread ? There's stuff all over the place... Maybe we should have one which lists two or three "ideal" DAW hardware set-ups: Athlon, PIII and P4 ?

[ This Message was edited by: Spirit on 2002-03-18 17:08 ]

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Tue Mar 19, 2002 8:13 am

I don't think it is a BAD solution. THe most important part is, that you keep you OS drive as primary master. This will make things much easyer to you, in case you will one day need to make a reinstallation (onless you plan on getting geeky

).

I am not 100% shure on this, but the reason, why I believe XP can split an IDE chanel in seperate speeds is, that in my device manager, drives on the same IDE controller are listed with different speeds. I do not know, if these speeds represent the drive's theoretical maxsppeds, or if it represent the drive's setup (actual working) speeds. But somehow, I have an idea, it is their setup speeds.

Immanuel

Immanuel