wrote:
Clyde wrote:
Don Pyeatt wrote:
I think this has been discussed before, but what is the best way to arrange drives on ports? Two hard drives on port A, two CDs on B, or what? I have CS on my boot drive and use the other hard disk for scratch files and storage.
TNX !
Don
HD on SATA and slow devices like CD/DVD on IDE. Of course, HD on SCSI would be even faster, but cost a fair bit more.
Agreed that SCSI is faster. But why would SATA be faster than IDE? Especially for a MB without a SATA port and requires some adapter.
I think the poster’s question is referring to IDE ports only.
Officially SATA runs at 150 MB/Sec while IDE ATA runs at 100/133 MB/Sec. That make SATA faster. You can get a newer version SATA that runs at 300.
However, with a 7200 rpm hard drive, the bottle neck is the transfer speed of the drive itself. I don’t thing there are any 7200 rpm disks that will transfer fast enough to matter with SATA 150.
If you do a lot of transfer of big chunks of data from one device to another, you do gain a tad by having everything on non-shared channels. SATA does have that over IDE. OK, it’s pretty minor and not likely to have much effect on desktop machines, but it might be noticeable.
I do have a WD Raptor HD that runs at 10K rpm. It is on a SATA channel. It does make a difference for what I use it for. (XP Pro Swap file and Photoshop’s Scratch Disk.)
In over a couple of decades of working on computers, I have never seen a noticeable performance in HDs based on what IDE channel was used for what device. It can affect the boot order, but I haven’t seen any speed difference. So, it is a rather esoteric question to ask. It does mean that the questioner is looking for fine improvements in HD performance.
With that in mind, it is appropriate to answer with a solution that can give fine improvements in HD performance.
Clyde
