ata 133 cable question

[public_eyesore]

i was wondering if you could hook a harddrive and dvd burner up onto the same cable. Would it work and also would performance be lost?

[Kaolian]

There are arguements either way on this. It really depends on if you will be primarily burning from a DVD drive to the DVD burner directly, or if you will be burning from the Hard drive to the burner. When you burn, the data is read from the target source drive, goes through the Bus, and is routed back out to the target device. Even if both devices are sharing the same cable, the data takes different paths down the cable so they don't collide. So there really isn't any slowing per say. Electrical signals running on pins next to each other do exhibit a very small electrical signal, but it is orders of magnitude smaller than the strength of the data signal, so the chance of interence is very, very small, even on rounded IDE cables. having the source drive and destination drive on different cables removes that possible error component, but at the same time there you increase your odds of having a bad IDE cable, which is of course highly unlikely in a system where the cables already were working.

So basically, no, you shouldn't have any problems having them both on the same cable. Just make sure, you have your jumpers set right, and if possible the primary drive on the plug closer to the motherboard.

[public_eyesore]

umm...im sorry but i dont understand your last sentence, can you clarify in 5 year old language :D

[reddog418]

Having your hard drive and DVD burner on the same IDE cable is like having 2 lane highway traffic, where both sides are coming at each other.

Putting them on their own IDE cable is like having an 8 lane highway with a concrete divider.

[Frakk]

wow you guys are complicating this way too much. no there will be no problems if you have 2 devices on a IDE cable, they have 2 connectors on them so you can have both on at the same time. there might be a minimal penalty for speed, but you will not notice it only in benchmarks.

[reddog418]

wow you guys are complicating this way too much. no there will be no problems if you have 2 devices on a IDE cable, they have 2 connectors on them so you can have both on at the same time. there might be a minimal penalty for speed, but you will not notice it only in benchmarks.
Hence my highway comparison. If you can think of a more simple metaphor than that, I'd like to hear it.

[Frakk]

theres no need to compare anything, he asked if it would work and if it would effect performance or not. and this is not a "who can give a better metaphor on ide cables" contest anyways.

[MrSlacker]

i have my CD-RW/DVD-ROM and my HDD on the same IDE cable. HDD is master and CD is slave. works just fine.

[public_eyesore]

k thanks that wil clean up my case a bit. :D

[nil8]

I do have to say that Kaolian gave a smart, descriptive and concise followup. Even if some didn't understand it. Good job.