I'm upgrading my base unit for digital photography and DV video. Santa kindly left me a new 80gig harddrive and I'm in the process of deciding which DVD burner to buy. My problem is the configuration of the system. My system: two 80gig 7200 HDs, DVD burner, I also want to retain my CD burner so I have the copy option, running 98Se. What would be the best way to configure the cabling of the four units to get the optimum performance? Any help regarding this problem would be appreciated.

Spingo

Thats a good question without a simple answer but here goes anyway.

Each ide adaptor can only service one attached device at any time, so if you want to move file from one disk to another then the best arrangement will be to have each drive on its own ide interface. So you would then have a hdd and optical drive on each interface.

On the other hand some old cdrom drivere would clobber the udma interface so if you had one of these you would want to put both your hdd drives on the same interface so this would not happen.

Then again if you want to copy files from your hdd to your cdrom then those drives would ideally be on different interfaces.

You will have to decide which is the best arrabgement for yourself. I have both my cd drives on one interface and a single hdd on the other. when I get another hdd it will go onto the sata interface so Im not going to worry about it :-)

You pays yer money and takes yer choice, mate.

Cheers Dave,

thanks for the info, my main use of the first drive would be for operating system, programmes and some storage, the second drive would be to store my digital pix and DV files, and your suggestion of separating them on different channels sounds good. But which slave drive would you suggest I put the DVD burner on?

John

you could try this arrangement;
primary master boot/os (original hdd)
primary slave dvd-burner
secondary master data-hdd (new enpty hdd)
secondary slave cd-burner

then when mastering dvds the data would be going from data-hdd to dvd-burner on seperate interfaces.

cd burning would have to take second place with this setup. try the transfer rate utilities supplied to check out the arrangeemnts you decide on.

hth

Dave will have a go at setting up system as you discribed and see how it pans out. Thanks

John