[clue-tech] Help with 2 hard drives on same IDE

[Kevin Fenzi]

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>>>>> "Roy" == Roy J Tellason <rtellason at blazenet.net> writes:

Roy> On Monday 19 September 2005 03:18 pm, Jeff Schroeder wrote:
>> A general rule is to split drives amongst as many IDE interfaces as
>> possible-- not really for the reason you're describing here, but
>> for performance reasons.  You'll get better throughput if you're
>> not sending twice the data (i.e., two drives) down one cable.
>> Plus, if the IDE interface on the motherboard dies for some reason,
>> you won't (potentially) hork two drives.

Roy> Not only that, but the way IDE works (as compared to SCSI, say)
Roy> it's all CPU-driven -- any given operation must complete before
Roy> any other operation can commence, so there's no overlap, which
Roy> means that things take longer on the average.  One of the reasons
Roy> why SCSI is so much faster on otherwise comparable drives.

While that used to be true a while back, I don't think it's at all the
case anymore. 

If you are using a IDE drive in PIO mode, the cpu indeed has to
handhold each command/transaction. However, any modern MB/drive should
support DMA, allowing the controller to do almost all the work. Also,
Linux at least supports things like tagged command queueing on IDE and
the like. 

For a while there you could see drives that were almost exactly the
same except for if they had a SCSI interface board on them, or a IDE
one (same platters, etc). I don't think thats the case anymore, since
so few SCSI drives are sold anymore. 

I'm hard pressed to think of a reason to buy SCSI drives anymore. 

kevin
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