EIDE cables Master Slave

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oilboy123

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Question on the EIDE cables.


This is a AMD Athlon 1800 Win XP OS.


I have 2 hard drives and a CDRW and DVD player. One hardrive is just for storage. Is it OK to have the 2 hardrives as cable select on one cable? Then the CDRW and DVD player on the other Cable, cable select?

Could I leave the CDRW and DVDs on the same cable with Cable select?
 
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Originally Posted By: tropic
It's perfectly all right in theory. In practice I've had less headaches manually jumpering drives as Master & Slave.

+1
 
I reloaded Win XP and this time I could not get it to find the master hardrive set as master.

So it is OK to have 2 hardrives on one EIDE cable, or 2 optical drives on one EIDE cable?
 
This might be out of left field, but... if it's a WD HDD without another ATA device on the ribbon, remove the jumper completely. Set it as Master only when it's sharing the cable with another (slave) device.

Yup, you can have 2 HDDs sharing an IDE cable, or 2 optical drives. I would probably put the HDDs on separate cables for faster transfers between the two, though.
 
Consider the end connector on ribbon cable as the master. The one in the middle as the slave. Set your device jumpers to match how they are connected.

Cable select can work but it is easy enough to set the jumpers manually.
 
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Originally Posted By: Dan55
On an older system I replaced the hard drive and cable, set the jumper and no matter what I did it refused to recognize the drive. Used Cable Select and everything was fine Another reason... http://www.pchell.com/hardware/masterslaveorcableselect.shtml


The weird thing is this is what I had to do to get it to find the hardrive. I have the DVD drive set as master and the CDRW set as slave and the DVD player won't open. The Sony site shows no drivers for the DVD player.

I am going to try the cable select for the optical drives. I should add that it takes longer to boot up now after setting the hardrives to cable select.
 
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Cable select requires a special cable that has a twist on a couple wires between master and slave. This let the port that you plug the drive into select the master/slave setting of the drive.

You can mix/match any HD with any DVD/CDRRW on any port. The only things to worry about is the speed will be based on the lowest performance on the cable. If you connect a HD that runs on UDMA5 to a CDRW that runs on UDMA2, then your HD will runs on UDMA2 as well and be slowed down. Also, having frequently accessed devices on the same cable will slow them down. If you use 2 HD at the same time and have them on the same cable, they will be chocked on the interface.
 
Also make sure that above UDMA33 you need the newer 80 wire cables that have grounds between signals. Without this your HD will have host CRC error all the time at 66Mhz and above.

Some drives have single drive, master, and slave setting. Single drive is there to let the drive run slightly faster when no slave is around (no need to do some of the handshake), but in general the performance advantage is so low that it is not worth bothering with.
 
Won't windows refuse to go above UDMA33 mode without an 80pin cable?

Linux will:

Quote:
hda: host max PIO4 wanted PIO255(auto-tune) selected PIO4
hda: drive side 80-wire cable detection failed, limiting max speed to UDMA33


I don't know why the drive-side 80-wire cable detection failed, it's an 80 wire cable. But it's an old 10GB drive and I really don't care as long as it works (it's going to be used for an Asterisk PBX).
 
Yea, and this drive might be old enough that it doesn't support more than UDMA33 anyway. It's also something like a 4200RPM drive, which is good for power consumption.
 
For what it's worth, I have had a few older CD-R and DVD drives that are a little picky about whether they're master or slave. Just to be safe, I always set all of my drive's jumpers manually.

I *think* the 80-pin business is required for UDMA33+, but a prior poster had a good point: Most drives; and perhaps more importantly, most applications will not use/ need more than that, and can only surpass that briefly during "bursting".

I ran a recording studio for years with UDMA33 drives, recording and playing back several tracks of 24 bit, 44.1KHz audio and they never wavered.
 
Originally Posted By: PandaBear
Cable select requires a special cable that has a twist on a couple wires between master and slave. This let the port that you plug the drive into select the master/slave setting of the drive.


Back in the day, yes. With the 80-conductor cables, this is not the case. Any 80-conductor cable will do just fine.

Quote:
You can mix/match any HD with any DVD/CDRRW on any port. The only things to worry about is the speed will be based on the lowest performance on the cable. If you connect a HD that runs on UDMA5 to a CDRW that runs on UDMA2, then your HD will runs on UDMA2 as well and be slowed down.



Nope. You can have a CD-RW running in DMA MW-2 on the same cable as an HDD running in UDMA 5. I've done it a million times.

Quote:
Also, having frequently accessed devices on the same cable will slow them down. If you use 2 HD at the same time and have them on the same cable, they will be chocked on the interface.



This is correct. And especially relevant with newer drives with higher transfer rates.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Originally Posted By: eljefino
UDMA33 is still faster than most drives, except for div>


Most drives?

Most newer drives will easily double that 33MB/sec in throughput. The latest offerings from Seagate and WD are in the neighbourhood of 140MB/sec.
 
Well I have tried master slave and now cable select on the optical drives. I still can't get the DVD to open.

I will try switching the drives on the cable.

I am not happy with the boot time. Takes one minute to go from pressing switch to boot into log on screen. About twice as long as it used to be.......I tried Auto in bios and then I tried the one that detects and assigns the Hardrives/Optical drives. Does not seem to help.
 
Originally Posted By: OVERK1LL
The latest offerings from Seagate and WD are in the neighbourhood of 140MB/sec.


Are they available with PATA interfaces?
 
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