Slaving Ultra ATA HDD question

fred_easey · 30 Jan 2006 at 16:31

Hi,

I want to add a new Ultra ATA HDD to my Shuttle SN45G (in place of the FDD).

Question is -

Do I get a new IDE cable with two connectors, plug that in to IDE1 and slave the new HDD to the old HDD (which has the OS and apps on) ...

...or do I plug it in to the same cable as the Optical drive (currently IDE2) and slave it to the optical drive?

...or a 3rd option which is better than the above?

Also, If I do option 1, will this type of IDE cable do a job for me:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_IDE_Cables_151.html

Any help much appreciated,

Cheers,

Fred

Jeff Crawly · 30 Jan 2006 at 16:37

Plug it into the cable with your ROM. Make the ROM the slave and the Hd the master. That way you will get much better speed when transfering files between Hd's as they will be on their own IDE channel.

leezer3 · 31 Jan 2006 at 14:26

The best 3rd option is to have the HDDs on different channels, but not sharing with a CDROM. (As I'm aware of it, all devices on a channel go at the speed of the slowest, so the HDD would be limited to CD speed?)
Therefore, if you have the space I would fit a PCI IDE adaptor

Seriously though, I doubt that unless you are doing masses of copying between the two drives then there will be much difference by having the two drives on the same channel.

-Leezer-

fred_easey · 31 Jan 2006 at 20:39

ok, so in summary, do I slave the optical drive to the 2nd HDD on IDE 2, or keep optical on it's own on IDE2 and slave HDD2 to HDD1 on IDE1?

ajgoodfellow · 2 Feb 2006 at 02:28

The old IDE cables (33-way) for ATA33/ATA66 used to run at the slowest speed of the device connected. In this case, a hard drive daisy chained with an optical drive will run at the speed of the optical drive (crippled)

With the new 66-way ATA100/ATA133 cables this restriction has been removed. In this case I'd put the drives on seperate channels as your disk to disk copy speed will be far better with this setup

Put the new HDD1 on IDE1 as Master. Put the old HDD2 on IDE2 as Master. Put the CD-ROM as Slave on HDD2

fred_easey · 2 Feb 2006 at 08:24

Ok, the $64K dollar question is, is the generic 2 device ATA cable that comes with the SN45G 33-way or 66-way? Is there an easy wasy of testing this? (should I just look on the Shuttle website?)

ajgoodfellow · 2 Feb 2006 at 12:38

You can tell by looking at the cable. The 80 way cables are far denser than the 40 way cables and the connections on the 80 way cables are colour coded, unlike the 40 way cables.

40 way cable:

80 way cable:

fred_easey · 3 Feb 2006 at 09:33

Pretty sure mine is 80 way. Ok, IDE2 master it is then.

Thanks for all the advice everyone.