Two CD drives: How to? (1 Viewer)

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Hey everybody,

I have either a finicky computer or a finicky CD drive, I don’t know which. Okay, I know this computer leaves a lot to be desired – just not as certain about the CD drives.

What the deal is, the drive that came with the computer is kinda cheap, and it doesn’t do a good job burning CDs for music playback. However it has no problem playing back any music CDs I feed it.

In the interest of burning some music discs, I installed a Yamaha CD drive a while back, and now I have just the opposite problem! Burns great music CDs, but when I try to load a music CD – either one off-the-shelf the store or one that’s been burned on a computer – half the time it can’t read it. (I’m certain it’s this POS computer – I’ve tried two different Yamaha drives and had the same thing.)

I guess you know where this is going. What I’d like to do is use both drives, one for play-back and one for burning.

So – what’s the procedure for doing this? I know about the master/slave settings on the drives, but what configuring would have to be done in order for the computer to recognize both of them and know what their intended function is?

Is there a step-by-step site someone can direct me to?

By the way, I don’t ever intend to burn directly from one drive to another, if that helps, so I’m not worried about snyc problems.

Thanks,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[SethH]

Have you ever installed a CD drive or HD before? It's pretty simple. Since you're not planning to burn directly from one to the other you can put them on the same IDE cable using the Master/Slave jumpers. 99.9% of IDE cables have multiple connections on them, so you can probably use the cables currently in your computer. Your MB may or may not have another audio input jack . . . but that's only necessary if you want to be able to listen to CD's from the new drive as well.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Yeah, I’ve installed both the drives in and out a few times, no problem there.

I guess the IDE cable is what’s already connecting the one in there? Sorry, I’m just barely there when it comes to computers...

So all I have to do is put it in, plug in the connections, set one for slave, one for master, and that’s it? When I boot up everything will work?

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[BruceD]

Wayne,

On your motherboard, there should be two connector sockets of exactly the same size with IDE ribbon cables coming out of them.

One of the sockets is labeled 1st IDE and the other Secondary IDE, typically.

Each cable connected to these sockets has multiple connectors on it at the other end for connecting multiple drives (HD, CD, DVD, etc.)

The question is how do you have the 2 CD drives and the hard disk (HD) hooked up now?

To get the maximum amount of performance out of your PC's HD, you should probably have it on an IDC channel all by itself. Then put both CD drives on the the other IDE channel with one drive's switches set to master and the other to slave.

Hope that helps.

 

[Mike Fassler]

yeah set one to master the other as slave, generally you want the one that will be doing the burning set to master, also make sure your ide cable is in good shape sometimes a cable that looks good isnt. now what I wanna know is what makes the pc a pos? what are the specs of the system?, because that can affect how good or bad a cd is burned.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Bruce,
Sorry for being less than clear – I only have the Yamaha installed right now. I’ve never had them both in together, only one or the other.

Again, I’m computer illiterate – I don’t know what an IDC channel is.

As far the IDE cables, I assume the 1st IDE would be for the master, the 2nd for the slave? Will the cables be marked as 1st and 2nd?

Mike, thanks for the info on which to assign as master and which as slave.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Mike Fassler]

he said IDC but meant IDE, nah all ide cables are the same, generally the connector at the very end is for master ht eone in the middle for slave. you have have 2 drives per channel.
you have primary master and slave = IDE slot 1 secondary master and slave = IDE slot 2, I genreally put my cd rom devices on ide channel 2 for simplicity, and all HDD's on channel 1 and one my raid controller.

 

[Chris]

You're dead on.

While ATA has changed since it's inception, one of the things that makes ATA work is polling. Whereas SCSI uses a series of definition and termination, ATA uses polling to define the bus. So, a polling interval continues to occur to keep track of all devices, and adjusts accordingly.

When you put two devices on the same channel, you in almost all tests, get the results from the devices equal to the slowest ATA supported transfer on that cable. So if you put a ATA/100 or ATA/133 HDD on a cable with a CDRW or DVDRW (which will be ATA/33) the HDD will not perform nearly as well as it would on it's own cable or on a cable with another HDD.

Now, if you've got two CDRWs or DVDRWs, then you have to realize having them both on the same cable means that polling will occur and -can- make it slower to copy straight from one drive to the other, which is a feat I find almost no use in, but I know some people do (you're almost always better/faster to cache to an HDD and spit back to a CDRW or DVDRW, works faster in almost all cases)

Now, if you've got SATA, etc. then it's not an issue at all

So, example from my PC to my wife's PC:

Mine:

WD74G 10K RPM SATA (Chan1)
2*300G Maxtor SATA (RAID-0, Nvidia RAID)
Pioneer DVD-RW: PATA Channel 1
Plextor DVD-RW: PATA Channel 2

Wife's:

80G WD: PATA Channel 1
NEC DVDRW: Master Channel 2
LiteOn DVDROM: Slave Channel 2

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Thanks for the help, everyone! It looks pretty easy.

The only thing I’m not clear on, when I get the second drive installed and boot up, will the computer recognize the new hardware and everything will work? Or will I need to do some kind of setting changes or configuration?

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Chris]

Everything will auto-identify, so Windows will see this. If it does not, check your BIOS and make sure the channels are set to "AUTO" and not "NONE" for IDE connections.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

In fact I have exactly such a setup. CD-ROM, CD-RW on one IDE, HD and ZIP-100 on the other. The only problem I have with it is something I just can't track down: for some reason when I insert a blank CD-R into the appropriate drive, the little icon under "My Computer" changes from "E: CD-RW" to "E: CD-ROM" and I have to go into the settings and hit "enable recording". Bizarre and highly annoying, and apparently unique to my system -- that is, I bet it won't happen to you. [Actually I was going to hook it up with the CDs on different cables, but one of my IDE cables was just a hair too short to reach!]