Member Avatar for nizzy1115

I have 2 200 gig hard drives (ata133 7200 rpm 8mg cash). in simple terms, would putting the os on one drive and and other files like music/videos etc on the other actually increase the speed of the computers read/write? My question is because they are both ide on the same cable. Does the cable limit the amount of data going through so its really not benificial? Thanks!

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Short answer: it can be, but only if the two drives aren't forced to share the same IDE channel or if your workload actually needs simultaneous I/O.

asked whether the IDE cable “cuts it in half.” On older PATA/IDE buses both devices share one channel and the controller services them one at a time, so two busy drives on the same cable will contend and not deliver two full independent streams. What matters is whether your workload does lots of concurrent reads/writes (video editing, multitrack audio, large backups) or mostly small OS/app accesses that are dominated by caching and latency.

Practical steps to get any real benefit:

  • Give each HDD its own channel: one as primary master and the other as secondary master (check your motherboard manual and jumper settings).
  • Use an 80-conductor IDE cable and verify UDMA mode in BIOS so the controller runs at the right transfer rate.
  • Avoid pairing very different drives on one cable (the slower device can limit the negotiated mode).
  • If the board supports SATA or you can add a controller, switching to SATA or a proper controller RAID will remove the single-bus limitation.

On RAID: striping (RAID0) can help large sequential transfers, but it increases failure risk and is not a substitute for backups; parity RAID protects against a single disk failure but has its own tradeoffs during rebuilds. and raised good points about limited desktop gains and redundancy—measure your real workload with a disk benchmark before committing.

If the goal is snappier OS/app performance, a single faster system drive (or, these days, an SSD) usually gives more noticeable benefit than two identical 7200RPM drives on one IDE cable. Regular backups remain essential.

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Member Avatar for goldeagle2005

The only time such a setup would help much would be when there are read/write operations going on both the hard drives simultaneously. Anyway, a RAID 0 setup will provide a much better performance.
Also, if you have just the two hard drives and no optical drives, you could connect each hard drive to an independent channel. If you have an Optical Drive(s), connect the hard drives on the primary channel, and the ODD on the second channel.

Member Avatar for nizzy1115

The only time such a setup would help much would be when there are read/write operations going on both the hard drives simultaneously. Anyway, a RAID 0 setup will provide a much better performance.
Also, if you have just the two hard drives and no optical drives, you could connect each hard drive to an independent channel. If you have an Optical Drive(s), connect the hard drives on the primary channel, and the ODD on the second channel.

Yeah i understand that all and i do have 2 rom drives also. Anyways i do read and write alot to both drives at the same time, but i was wondering that obviously 2 drives are faster than 1, but does the ide cable connecting both harddrives limit the ammount of bandwidth available to both drives (like cut it in half for each drive) so the difference would be negalbe?

Member Avatar for alc6379

Running the drives in a RAID on the same IDE channel might hurt things, actually. If you wanted to do that approach, you'd want them on independant channels, preferably an IDE RAID card.

Truth be told, I've seen benchmarks that indicate RAID 0 is not really that big of a performance booster for desktop usage. For that 1-3% increase in read/write speed you're getting, you're putting your self in a data loss position, because if one drive fails, you lose the data on both the drives with a RAID 0.

Personally, I just run with 2 drives. I install Windows on one drive, and keep all my applications on it. Then, I store all of my data on another drive. My Documents and other types of files I keep where they'd normally be, but I back them up monthly to my second hard drive. (It's just more convenient to leave those documents there for me). If hard drive performance is really an issue for you, consider picking up some Western Digital Raptors, or something fast like that, for your system drive. If you're doing something like video/music editing, where you read or write a lot to your data drive, I'd do the same for it.

Member Avatar for goldeagle2005

Running the drives in a RAID on the same IDE channel might hurt things, actually. If you wanted to do that approach, you'd want them on independant channels, preferably an IDE RAID card.

Truth be told, I've seen benchmarks that indicate RAID 0 is not really that big of a performance booster for desktop usage. For that 1-3% increase in read/write speed you're getting, you're putting your self in a data loss position, because if one drive fails, you lose the data on both the drives with a RAID 0.

Only 1-2 %? Shock! shock! Whats the advantage of RAID 0 thrn? RAID 5 would be better as it provides for data backup.

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