Correctly setting master/slave
 

I have an 80gb ST380021A that i would like to be c:\, an 8gb Quantum Fireball CR8.4A that i would like to be d:\, an AOpen CD-RW CRW4850 that i would like to be e:\ and a DVD-ROM JLMS XJ-HD1665 that i would like to be f:\. How can i make this happen when i next reformat my computer?

put the two hard drives on IDE 0 cable the other two on IDE 1
set the ST to MASTER, the 8gb fireball to SLAVE
CDRW to SLAVE and DVDROM to E:\

IDE0----CABLE-----ST 80GB-----8gb fireball
IDE1----CABLE-----CDRW--------DVD

you should be able to change drive letters under NT/XP pretty much as you like in the drive setup jsut go into tthe administration panel and lod up the drive tool, assign letters in there.

Or if you want the better throughput by having the hard drives on seperate ide channels with the Cd drives....1 hard drive and 1 cd per ide...and You are using Windows XP...just install let it mane the drives how ever it wants and then first thing after install change the drive letters around.

its under Administrative tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management

GreyDR: Although you'll get a higher performance when both drives are in use at the same time, that will hamper the speed of the hard drives though when the CDs are in use. since IDE can only service one comand at a time, the system has to wait for the CD or DVD to finish its tasks before completing.

Sinec CD/DVDs are an order of magnitude slower than a hard drive, it can be quite a slowdown.

Especially if the CD or DVD is an ATAPI device, this makes it even slower, since ATAPI is a different protocol than hard drives use, thirdly if the CD/DVD does not support bus mastering and the hard drives do, it may cause problems.

And finally, but less common these days if the motherboard doesn't support independant timing per channel the slowest device in the chain becomes the fastest both will work at, however most modern systems do support independant channel timing.

charliex, you are correct. I dont know what I was thinking. Actually I do....I had my comp with the setup i suggested a while back and didnt have any problems except when i was using the DVD drive and trying to access my primary HD. I'm currently running all 4 drives on different channels with the on board promise controller for my HD's. Sorry for the bad info on the drive set up....but Id still not worry overly much about which HD were if I already had them in my machine and would just change drive letters in XP :)

Ok thanks for the info. Does it matter which ide channel i have the drives on, e.g. will putting the hdd on the secondary channel reduce my performance at all?

it is better to pu thte haddrives on the primary chanell and the optical drives on the secondary. It is most noticable for me when i do it the other way when it is time to boot the system. It seems to take longer if the haddrives are on the secondary channel. Of course that may be a preceived difference. My only real advice is dont use the cable select option.