I currently have my HDD as primary master, DVD-ROM as secondary master & CD-RW as secondary slave. I bought yesterday a DVD-RW (LG-4163), and I was wondering where exactly should I install it.. One thought is to have the CD-RW as primary slave along with the HDD, and DVD-RW & DVD-ROM in secondary channel(primary & slave). But many have told me that if I have an optical drive in the same channel with my HDD, this will slow my HDD down. Is this true? And if this is the case, does this only happen when they work in the same time? Because this will only happen when I record CD’s. Or does this affect my pc’s performance even when the CD-RW is idle??
I could get rid of the CD-RW, but I thought if this is ok, I could keep it and use it for my CD recordings, so that I won’t push my DVD-RW too much.. Also I don’t wanna put any extra controllers, because then I would be pushing my PSU.
Any opinions??

I guess the only problem might arise if you try to burn a disk or copy files from the CD-RW to your hard disk.
When u do that, data would have to go from the hard drive to your memory and back to the CD-RW through the same cable.
That synchronous two-way data transfer might create a slight delay and/or potential buffer underruns when the hard disk is under heavy load.

I think it'd be better to install the Hard drive with the DVD-ROM together and leave the two burners on the secondary IDE.
With the DVD-ROM on the same cable as the hard disk, you'd only have to worry about performance and not burning quality.

That's my idea of IDE channel communication anyway

(in reply to dante02004)

I'll second that...hear the man, afterall he's mugatu :P

(in reply to Leibniz)

Obey my dog!

(in reply to fernandes)

well, the only time I would be using my CD-RW would be for CD recording (data from my HDD to a CD, or CD2CD, from the DVD to the CD-RW).. But DVD performance is also important to me, my DVD-ROM(SONY DDU1621) is kinda crap..

(in reply to Leibniz)

Yeah, in this case, I'd do what Leibniz proposed as well.
However, you can put the CDRW on the same channel as well, but don't burn at extremely high speeds then. It'll still work at 8x or more with no probs but at much higher speeds, one can't guarantee the performance there.
What problems are you having with your Sony at the moment?
If you want to do it from DVD to CDRW, put both of them on different IDE channels. It works better that way :).
HD to CD will be a bit less sensitive to it all but again... depends on the speed.

(in reply to dante02004)

My sony DVD doesn't read very wel, especially with movies(it gets stuck a lot), and it hasn't been able to read well DVDs burned by my friends. I thought of upgrading its firmware, but I have version 1.6, and only 1.7 has come out from the series 1.xx, and then it goes to 2.xx series, all the way to 4.1. But I've read that I can only upgrade to a version from the same series(which is sooooooooo lame

(in reply to Einstein)

which Sony DVD-ROM is it?

(in reply to dante02004)

I mentioned it before, it's SONY DDU1621...

(in reply to Iggy)

I thought these times were over, but today I experienced kind the same problems with sata controller ...

Burning
from sata hdd (hitachi deskstar 120GB)
to sata dvdwriter (pioneer dvr-212)
using a sil3112 (abit nforce2 motherboard)
causes problems.

Whatever the write speed, 4x on fresh verbatim dvd-r, Nero reported me hundreds of errors on the first quarter of the disc.
In fact its worst than old buffer underrun problems, its some kind of data corruption o_o. The burned videos can be watch sometimes, with display quirks, but sometimes it make the codec crash ...

Now I copy my files on my pata hdd (old but loved WD 80GB) and then burn to the pioneer and theres no more data inconsistencies.

At first I thought the writer was in fault, especially after reading its cdrinfo review lol but after some internet digging, i found some issues related to simultaneous use of both sata channels .. (on silicon image website they say it features 2 independent dma , that doesnt seems to help here i guess lol)

I ran two test burns using the pata hdd to sata dvdwriter and it seems okai, but im still writing at 4x for the moment :)

By the way, Im wondering if its pure hardware problem or if its specific to windows here, I spend one day making backups under linux and IIRC I transfered data from my secondary sata drive to the sata dvdwriter ... but I cant be sure now.... I hope im wrong here because these dvd were not divx but plain rar archives and they dont accept bits errors nicely lol

Bye

(in reply to dante02004)