Channel # Master and Slave assignment ?

aramp1

aramp1

Member
Okay, I’ve got my bios set to have a max of six IDE drives. This is the setting with the most amount that I can find. I guess that would make since because I have three IDE plug-ins on the board (three masters and three slaves). Well, I also have 4 SATA slots.

I'm using three SATA slots for two hard drives and a DVD burner and I'm using one IDE slot for a hard drive set to master and another DVD burner set to slave. So, when I start up, the board bios shows I have “channel 0 master and slave” which is the IDE hard drive and IDE DVD burner. For “channel 2 master and slave” and “channel 3 master”, I have the two SATA hard drives the SATA DVD burner with nothing assigned to the “channel 3 slave”.

My question is since I have more plug-ins on the board, is there a way to add more drives? What happened to the "channel 1"? And, how does a USB drive play into the picture?
 
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I would say that the biggest problem that you're going to run into is that you're probably going to run out of addresses for devices. Before that point though, have at as many hard drives as you'd like!
 
Then how do some people have computers with multiple (I've seen as many as 8, but I'd guess that there are more) hard drives?
 
I do it with a controller card. I have 6 hdds, only 4 are connected straight to the mobo. The other two go into a Promise IDE RAID 0 controller card.

BTW, I'm not positive, but I have heard it is not smart to put an optical drive, such as your DVD burner, on the same channel as a hard drive. I'm not positive though, it was years ago I heard that.
 
Palatzo said:
I do it with a controller card. I have 6 hdds, only 4 are connected straight to the mobo. The other two go into a Promise IDE RAID 0 controller card.

BTW, I'm not positive, but I have heard it is not smart to put an optical drive, such as your DVD burner, on the same channel as a hard drive. I'm not positive though, it was years ago I heard that.
Click to expand...

Yeah... because if you have both drives on the same channel, then when you burn a DVD, only one channel is being used to retrieve data from your hard drive and then send it to your DVD burner.
 
ReverseFluxx said:
Yeah... because if you have both drives on the same channel, then when you burn a DVD, only one channel is being used to retrieve data from your hard drive and then send it to your DVD burner.
Click to expand...

Is that bad? I burned "office space" in like 10 minutes with no problem. There's no way I'm going to be able to not combine them on the same channel that I can think of.
 
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