Jez,
Here's my two cents:
Get a PCI expansion card with an extra IDE controller, and hook your
CDDVDReW devices up to that. Preferrrably with two cables.
It is most likely that the mother bord has one controller on board with two
channels (and thus two connectors). Connect each drive to its own channel
with its own cable.
If you want to go through with this, let me suggest that you do it in steps,
allowing windows to get used to the new situation after each removal, move
or addition of a device.
Regards,
Bart
On 8/18/06, Jez Cunningham <jez.cunningham@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
> So my Dell has two hard drives (C: has WinXPpro and applics, D: has
> the data and scratch/temp directories), and I have a CD-burner and a
> DVD reader. (And an external USB2 drive has the backups.)
>
> There are two IDE ribbon cables coming off the mother board, and the
> way they are routed around the box encourages putting both hard drives
> on one cable and both cd/dvd drives on another. I assume each cable
> is one controller and it might be better to make a different
> configuration so that C and D are separated?
>
> what do you think?
> thanks
> jez
>
> On 8/18/06, Bart Wientjes <bartjew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > (E)IDE and ATA were designed and manufactured in order to connect two
> disks
> > to one channel, using one cable. Generally this was regarded as a
> > non-desirable configuration, as the standard does not allow for the two
> > disks to be addressed simultaneously.
> > Usually one controller has two channels. I think attaching the two disks
> to
> > separate channels of the same controller does allow for paralellism.
> > The situation for sata is practically identical, but they skipped the
> > two-drives-on-one-channel bit that was a bad option anyhow. And they
> made
> > the cabling more flexible :)
> >
> > So if you want to have many disks, you need to have many controllers.
> > SCSI of course still is an option. With SCSI you can drive multiple
> devices
> > simultaneously in the same channel (yeah I know it's called a bus), its
> just
> > that you are sharing bandwith.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Bart
>
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