Quick question about IDE/ATA cables
- Thread starter Michael
- Start date
Optical drives(ide not sata) always have to designated as master or slave depending on the position of the cable they are on. For master that would be at the end while the middle is for slave there. For a one hard drive one optical drive setup you would master the hardware and simply slave the dvd drive on the one cable.
WRONG!!!! you can use CS for both devices even if they are sharing the same cable. what you cant do is make your primary hdd a slave...that's a no no
Apparently you haven't worked with too many optical drives have you. One thing for certain is running two optical drives on the same cable requires the master/slave settings there. Often when running two hard drives on the same cable the slaved drive or both have to set to CS in order for them to work together.
The new build here will face a similar situation with the cd writer seen on the one ide cable with Vista on the single ide type hard drive there. I will probably end up slaving the hard drive there as well. XP will be on the first sata. But for boards with two ide channels most will master the hard drive on the first ide cable and master a single optical on the second if not slaving it on the first. The need to slave the Vista drive there will be due to installing a sata dvd burner with the need to stretch the single ide cable down like you found worked out there.
The style and type of case with a larger space between a HD cage if seen there and the 5.25" bays makes that necessary at times. As far as an OSed drive you can make any the default boot device in the hardware configuration section of the bios. Vista presently sits on the second ide drive slaved here. If I see a new mbr written to it I simply bring that drive to the top of the list of drives seen there. When Vista was first installed before reinstalling XP and later Vista again to the Pro and Home editions both seen in the boot options the "slaved" second 250gb ide drive was set as the default boot device to see Vista load automatically while in the process of testing various games and apps to see which ones would run on the new version of Windows.
i have my four ide devices, three hdds and one dvdburner all set to cs. they work just fine, always have. dell has always used cs on all their builds. it is easier to setup and easier to ts with end users. no jumpers to worry about, no worrying about which is the master and which is the slave, just tell me what part of the cable it is connected to and i'll tell you...so if dell has been wrong all these years, they would have been out of business before teh SEC caught their backdating scandal.
Seeing CS used in prebuilt system is nothing new there. In fact most drives will lack a jumper pin to start off with. They design their systems that way for quiick replacement of hardwares by their service techs. That also allows for fast assembly on a production line without hassles of checking which drive is set to what.
Now try building your own case and find things are different in a custom build. That can be any hardware combination there.
Now try building your own case and find things are different in a custom build. That can be any hardware combination there.
ummm, yeh, like i said, my CUSTOM built system has all 4 devices also jumpered to CS...easy come easy go...
K3rupt
New Member
PCEye Is Correct.
I would always Use Master and Slave on all my systems.
Cable select is the easy way out.
Master and Slave, you are Choosing the exact order you wish to use.
Why is CUSTOM Capitalised?
90% of Users have CUSTOM Pc's as you would say.
i said CUSTOM built cause i pieced all the parts myself and built the computer from scratch. 90% of users have custom pc's??? nah, they just buy whatever the vendor is selling...not the same and you know that
With two ide channels the preferred and usual method would be to set the first and maybe only optical as a secondary master there while the hard drive is mastered on the primary. When running two hard drives even the same make and model drives you may have to set the slaved or both to CS if needed there.
Optical drives are often a little more fussy and probably the main reason for seeing less two channel boards now is the obvious trend to sata while still offering some ide capacity. Even with sata you don't see any specific performance gain but remove the master/slave/cable select dilemna when one drive isn't seen by another. The new build here will certainly see another good mix with both ide and sata optical drives as well as ide and sata hard drives.
Optical drives are often a little more fussy and probably the main reason for seeing less two channel boards now is the obvious trend to sata while still offering some ide capacity. Even with sata you don't see any specific performance gain but remove the master/slave/cable select dilemna when one drive isn't seen by another. The new build here will certainly see another good mix with both ide and sata optical drives as well as ide and sata hard drives.