Hard Drive-CD Drive Install & Master-Slave--Does It Matt

[JjcampNR]

Hard Drive-CD Drive Install & Master-Slave--Does It Matter?


Ok, I've always thought that the best way to install a system with 2 hard drives and a CDRW and CDROM drive is by putting the primary hd to primary master, and the CDROM to primary slave, then the CDRW to secondary master and the 2nd HD to secondary slave, but then I ran across an article in MaximumPC that said setting a Hard Drive to be the master of a CD Drive slows down the performance of the Hard Drive.

Basically, I have the following system that I'm attempting to get configured and I just want to be sure I get the max performance out of my hardware that I can since this box is going to be a server for my apartment.

Here's what I have: Tyan S2510 motherboard (2 on-board IDE and 2 on-board SCSI), 2 x 160Gig Maxtor 5400RPM IDE drives, 1 x Quantum 7200RPM SCSI Drive, 1 x CDRW, 1 x CDROM.

Now, I want to use the SCSI drive as my system drive since it's faster, SCSI, and only 9Gig. I can put that on it's own SCSI channel no problem since I only have 1 SCSI drive and 2 channels to work with.

Where the real questions come in are with the 4 IDE devices I have left. What I want to do is setup a RAID-1 (software) config with the two Maxtor IDE drives so if I put them on seperate IDE channels I would see a performance gain since they do run in parallel. However, how should they be setup with the 2 optical drives?

I had never heard that setting a HD as master to a CD drive would cause a loss in performance, but MaximumPC has always been very accurate with the info they publish. Has anyone else heard or seen evidence of this slowdown?

Should I put the 2 hard drives as slaves on seperate channels and set the optical drives as masters? Should I set 1 hard drive as a master on the primary and the CDROM as the slave, then put the CDRW as master on the secondary and the other HD as secondary slave? I'm just looking for some opinions and explinations because I've searched all over and just can't seem to find any information relating to this topic.


Thanks in advance,

Josh
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