IDE Drive Jumper Setting

[7TFord]

- Have finished my new Win 7/64-bit build now and I've got this new old stock Deskstar IDE drive that I want to use for storage. I just want it to show up as an independent device with a drive letter but wanted to verify which jumper setting and ribbon cable connectors to use. Should it be a "Master" as a single device or "Cable Select" Master....gray or black connector? As my OS drive is SATA I assume this shouldn't be considered as a slave second drive. Should there be any changes required in the BIOS?

Thanks

 

[Deltona_Dave]

If you are only going to have the one drive on that cable, set it to Master Single device. If you use Cable Select, the end connector is your master. The connector in the middle is your slave.

In the BIOS, set the SATA as the boot drive.

Dave

 

[Rand]

if you need to you can partition and format it with disk management

start menu >type in search box > diskmgmt.msc

as mentioned above you may need to change the boot hdd order in the bios.

Oh and on some drives there are different settings for single and master.. but usually its the same setting.

 

[greenaccord02]

Cable select should always be used if it's present. The drive at the end of the cable should be the master and the other one should be the slave according to best practice and convention. Therefore, no matter if there's one or two drives on the cable, cable select is the preferred configuration. If you're only hooking up one drive, just put it on the end of the cable and leave the middle connector blank. The presence of a slave drive is checked for using pin #39 and then master/slave assignments are made based on a signal carried on pin #29.

The purpose of Master and Slave is to decide which one takes precedence in the event of I/O operations taking place on both drives at the same time. It is for this reason that you shouldn't put two drives that will often exchange data on the same IDE cable, nor should you put a hard disk and an cd burner on the same cable if it is likely that the cd burner will be drawing it's data from that same hard drive. It creates a bottleneck and can lead to longer transfers in the first case and buffer under-runs in the latter.

 

[berniedd]

Your OS is in the SATA drive with its own data cable. Therefore your old IDE drive will be connected to another, different data cable. You are perfectly OK with setting the IDE drive as single master. Heck, you can even set its jumper so that it's slave. It will still function ok. Just make sure you go into BIOS and set the computer to boot from the SATA drive.

 

[Rand]

Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
Cable select should always be used if it's present. The drive at the end of the cable should be the master and the other one should be the slave according to best practice and convention.


according to who? comptia?

its largely irrelevant now as some computers don't have even 1 ide device in them.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: Rand
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
Cable select should always be used if it's present. The drive at the end of the cable should be the master and the other one should be the slave according to best practice and convention.


according to who? comptia?

its largely irrelevant now as some computers don't have even 1 ide device in them.



Thank you, I just LOL'd

I know that in my experience it is usually the OEM's that go for Cable Select on everything. HP, DELL....etc. I was a big fan of dedicated Master/Slave. Likely a carry-over from working on SCSI and assigning every device a specific ID.....

 

[greenaccord02]

Originally Posted By: Rand
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
Cable select should always be used if it's present. The drive at the end of the cable should be the master and the other one should be the slave according to best practice and convention.


according to who? comptia?

its largely irrelevant now as some computers don't have even 1 ide device in them.



According to pretty much anybody. That setting allows for the least screw-ups and risk of incorrect configuration. The guy asked a question and I gave the most complete answer I could. Of course it's irrelevant, but that was the question. With respect to the OP, I thought it would be best to give a complete answer and a solution that was most likely to work and give trouble free operation in the future if ever there was a change in the setup.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
Originally Posted By: Rand
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
Cable select should always be used if it's present. The drive at the end of the cable should be the master and the other one should be the slave according to best practice and convention.


according to who? comptia?

its largely irrelevant now as some computers don't have even 1 ide device in them.



According to pretty much anybody. That setting allows for the least screw-ups and risk of incorrect configuration. The guy asked a question and I gave the most complete answer I could. Of course it's irrelevant, but that was the question. With respect to the OP, I thought it would be best to give a complete answer and a solution that was most likely to work and give trouble free operation in the future if ever there was a change in the setup.


You gotta admit the CompTIA reference was funny

 

[Rand]

yes the comptia reference was a bad joke.

Honestly we always went master/slave as when cable select first came out it didnt work with half the cables correctly.

heck some of those oem cheapboxes didnt even come with cables with 2 connectors.

I just wondered if there was a specific reference somewhere that was promoting cable select.. or it was your personal preference.

 

[PandaBear]

Cable Select only works if you have a cable that has a twist in the middle between the 2 drives for a few of the wires. If yours is flat cable from beginning to end with no twist, do not use Cable Select. It is something for a production line to go fast without much jumper setting or stocking drives with different jumper settings.

The master should be your higher priority drive for booting or if there is only one drive. Since you are not booting and has only one drive, set it to master if you are using a non cable select cable, or set it to CS if using a cable select cable.

 

[greenaccord02]

The twisted cables are only for drives that don't support cable select. If the drive has the CS option (like pretty much every IDE drive for the last ten years), you can just use regular 80 pin IDE cables, all of which support the CS standard.