On Sat, 14 Oct 2006 12:35:34 +0000, Pete thoughtfully wrote:

> Hi
>
> I have a typical P4 2.6 system with 2 IDE connectors on my motherboard. I
> have 2 DVD burners and 1 IDE hard disk (main system drive) on my machine.
> All the drives are installed and working OK but I get problems with access
> speeds / bandwidth when I use the burner that is on the same channel as
> the hard disk.
>
> I have heard that for multiple simultaneous burners it's best that the
> burners are on separate IDE channels. I happen to have an old ABIT hot rod
> 100 raid controller card and was going to hook the main IDE drive up to
> this so that I could have the burners connected as masters on each of the
> ide channels on the motherboard and no secondary devices connected at all.
>
> Does this make sense?
>
> Do I need to change any bios settings to set the abit raid PCI card up as
> a master device?
>
> Is there a better way of doing this?
>
> Will the Abit hot rod 100 card be OK?
>
> Will accessing my prmary hard disk through the Abit card degrade hard disk
> access speeds?
>
> Will using a card like the Abit raid controller on the PCI bus degrade
> other PCI or AGP devices because it may be a bandwidth hog?
>

I don't know about the Abit raid controller card but you only have the one
HD.

I thought the reccommendation was to put similiar speed devices on the
same IDE channels. HD is on PIO 4 or ATA 100/133 while DVDs are usually
ATA 33/66 at best. Putting a ATA 100 with ATA 33 on the same IDE slows
traffic on the channel. HDs on IDE1 and DVDs on IDE2.

From a use point of view how frequent will you use you HD versus using
either DVD?

> Please feel free to respond to any or all of the points i have raised.
>
> Any other advice / issues?
>
> Thanks
>
> Pete