I'm building a computer and I have some questions (1 Viewer)

[Jonathan Lofgren]

I now have all of the pieces for my new computer, but I have some questions. I have 2 IDE slots on my mother board and I have a hard drive, a DVD drive, and a CDRW drive. I can make 2 masters and 1 a slave. Which should I configure as which? I guess I don't have any other questions except a general invitation for advive on computer building. I have only built one computer before so I don't know too much.
Here are my parts for any specific advice:
Gigabyte GA-7VRXP motherboard W/Athlon XP 1800
Toshiba 16X DVD (SDM1612)
Lite-On 32x12x40x CDRW
WD 80GB WD800JB hard drive
512meg PC2700 DDR ram
Teac 1.44 floppy
Aopen GF4Ti4200
SB Audigy 5.1
Win XP home

Thank you!

 

[John*paulJ]

Since your going to be writing and reading from the hard drive and the cdrw I would say make both of those the masters and the dvd drive the slave only for reading...

 

[Danny R]

Generally you don't put a CD/DVD type media on the same channel as the hard drive. This is because your most frequent transfers are from the CD->Hard drive and in the case of a burner, the opposite. Since devices on the same channel are sharing the bandwidth, this makes for a slower transfer. Also CD type media don't use quite the same protocol as hard drives, so mixing the two can cause a performance hit. Thus you put the Hard drive as the master on one channel, and the CD-RW as the master on the other.

But what to do with the DVD? DVD drives are also best placed as master, as they may have problems with playback as a slave. Thus the best thing performance wise to do would be to buy a third IDE controller to run this device. However barring that, you just need to decide what you will be doing more... burning CD's, or watching movies. If you watch more movies, then put the DVD as the secondary with the CD-RW. It will run better on that channel than with the hard drive. If however you burn lots of CD's, then put the DVD as the secondary with the hard drive, so it doesn't slow the CD-RW up.

The reason you don't want the CD-RW as the secondary is because its much more likely to generate coasters in that position than as a master.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

This is how I'd do it:

IDE 1
Hard drive (master)

IDE 2
DVD (master)
CD-RW (slave)

Your DVD playback will then not be affected by IDE 'bottleneck'. Similarly, your CD-RW drive will be able to burn data from the HD with the least chance of buffer underrun problems.

The only slight drawback in this configuration is that direct CD-to-CDR copying will be a little slower. But then again, there's no reason why you can copy the CD to an image file on the HD, then burn that to the CD-R. That's going to be the safest way to do it anyway.

 

[Josh Lowe]

With that configuration CD->CD-RW copying will probably not work at all, due to the limitations EIDE. I know that burning from hard disk -> CD-RW when both drives are on the same channel does not work very well, if at all. However, it is still the best configuration for your application. To get around the issue of not being able to burn directly from CD->CD-R, just create an ISO of the CD to be copied down to the hard drive, then burn the image from disk onto a target CD-R.

In the SCSI world you can do that with no problem at all.

 

[Paul Spurgeon]

Rather than an Audigy, go for the Turtle Beach/Voyetra Santa Cruz. It's cheaper and is totally compatible with the VIA chipset, unlike Creative's products, which are notorious for being incompatible with VIA.

Also, that mobo has built-in RAID so I think you should be able to put each IDE device on a different channel using the controller, thus eliminating all this slave/master garbage.

If you're buying this stuff online BUY IT SOON because manufacturers like Dell, Gateway, etc are buying up all OEM parts for the Christmas season. The RAM I'm about to buy at newegg.com went up almost $40 in the past 3 days, and the vid card and processor have also gone up!

 

[Rob Gillespie]

CD-RW copying will probably not work at all, due to the limitations EIDE.

It should work fine as long as the burn speeds kept low. I used to run this same configuration on my old (old) system which had a Cyrix 233 processor and 64mb of PC66 RAM. I remember it working OK at x4.

 

[Jonathan Lofgren]

Paul or any one else,
I actually already have the parts. You know my motherboard better than I do. I do have 4 ide slots. The 3rd and 4th slots say "(RAID/ATA133)". Can I just put the hard-drive on 1, my CDRW on 2, and my DVD on 3? Thanks!

 

[nolesrule]

Unless I am mistaken, you can use either 1 and 2 OR 3 and 4. I had a board with four a year or two ago and the first 2 were for DMA33 and the other 2 were for DMA66 (I think...might have been 66 and 100). And you could only use one set of IDE connections or the other.

 

[Paul Spurgeon]

I believe you can just hook up each device to one IDE port apiece and you'll be fine. Each port supports up to ATA133 so you won't have any speed troubles.

I remember reading somewhere that although the Gigabyte board is quite good (it's actually the one I'm getting after much research), the 3rd DIMM slot is not functional. If you ever upgrade your RAM keep that in mind.