ATA transfer speeds

[Lexeus]

Just a quick question. Somewhere along the line I picked up that if you have 2 drives on an IDE channel they can only transfer data at the slowest drive's speed, so if you have an ATA-66 CDROM and an ATA-133 HDD connected to a channel they would both be restricted to ATA-66.
Is this correct ? Doesn't seem so likely when I think about it

thanks

[Austin]

It is feasible and I don't know for certain one way or another. I'd imagine it depends on the mobo chipset in question, possibly drivers too.

However ATA133 is overkill, even ATA100 is more than most drives get close to, certainly with any regularity. It is often considered best to keep optical devices on different channels to your HD(s) firstly because HDs need more bandwidth and secondly they may get slowed down by an ATA33/66 device (as you heard). However equally if you have more than one HD you should put them on different channels BECAUSE they use more of the bandwidth so are much more likely to 'choke' each other. Bottom line I'd say try to keep the drives most likely to be used simultaneously on different channels and you should be fine if not optimal.

EDIT: Too many shoudl instead of should, doh!

[Lexeus]

So at the moment I have my 120 gig on the IDE socket of the SATA controller, my 40 gig, windows disk, on the primary IDE, and my combo drive on my secondary IDE (Quite an old combo drive).
So where should I stick another drive if I get one, most probably wont be a SATA drive.
I'm thinking on the same channel as the combo drive since it will probably only be used to store downloads anyway, but the problem is the longest IDE cable I could find in all my stuff only just reaches the combo drive. the drive is an old style one, so it is longer and slightly wider, and because of my case being completely tool less it has to be put right at the top as its only held from dropping through all the 5" bays by two pieces of screwed up paper shoved in some holes. If it wasn't at the top it wouldn't be balanced by the roof of the case you see
so i'm not sure I will be able to put another drive on that lead, as I dont think it will stretch. If I put a second HDD on the windows disk channel would it slow it down ? Even if I had notihng on the second HDD which would need to be accessed on boot, such as program instllations ?

[Richie]

SATA is good in this respect as each drive has a dedicated channel...

[Austin]

Lexeus it probably matters little, so long as you avoid putting drives on the same channel which are likely to be used simultaneously you'll be fine. Putting the two HDs on the same channel won't have much effect if any on drive perf unless you use them both at the same time. At the end of the day I seriously doubt you'd ever feel a perf penalty of channel sharing anyway, esp as most of the fastest consumer HDs tend to achieve around 40-50MB/s (ATA66 allows up to 66MB/s).

[Lexeus]

k thanks austin

[td5]

On my nForce2 , KT266A (686B south) and SIS 735, they all have no problems running the chain at full speed , with slower devices attached.

At the moment, I have a Diamondmax Plus9 running in mode6 (ata133) and a barracuda4 running in mode5 (ata100). There are no issues.