Member Avatar for chrisbliss18

I recently had a brief back and forth with nizzy1115 about IDE channel sharing and how to set up drives on the channels for maximum performance. Since there isn't a "right answer", I was curious what everyone's take was.

My opinion is that harddrives are used more often than optical drives, so it's better to have optical drives sharing a channel with harddrives than it is for harddrives to share channels. My system usage is harddrive intensive though, so I am biased. I have three internal harddrives and two external, and I always have slowdowns when I am making transfers between the two drives that share a channel.

What do you guys think?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by Coconut Monkey

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Following ’s observation about slow copies when two drives share an IDE channel and ’s point about keeping like devices together, here are concise, practical rules based on how the interfaces actually work.

Parallel ATA (IDE/PATA) uses a shared bus with up to two devices on one cable; the channel serializes activity so two drives cannot transfer at full speed simultaneously. Serial ATA (SATA) is point-to-point, so each drive gets its own link and can operate independently. See the hardware summaries for each: Parallel ATA and Serial ATA.

What to do:

  • Put the boot/scratch drive on the primary (or first SATA) port so it’s not competing.
  • If you do frequent drive-to-drive copies, avoid putting both source and destination on the same PATA channel. On a PATA-only board, place the two busiest HDDs on different channels.
  • Use optical drives to occupy less-used channels if you must share, but prefer moving HDDs to SATA where available.
  • Always use an 80-conductor IDE cable for UDMA/66+ speeds and confirm jumpers/cable-select behavior is correct. If a device reports errors repeatedly the controller may fall back to PIO or a lower DMA mode, which can slow every device on that channel—check BIOS/Device Manager and chipset drivers.

Easy fixes if constrained by ports: move a drive to a free SATA port, add a PCI(e) SATA controller, or use an external USB/eSATA enclosure. Those eliminate the shared-channel bottleneck without complex jumper juggling.

Member Avatar for Coconut Monkey

I just remembered this topic, and came back for a look. No replies! Shockers. Time to rectify.....

I'm of the belief that drives should only share channels with devices of the same type. Optical drives on one channel, hard drives on the other. Now, I'm buggered if I can remember any benchmarks or official tests that prove what's best, and I'm buggered if I can be bothered looking anything up at this hour of the night.

That said, my "belief" stems from the (possibly horribly incorrect) knowledge that:

  • Optical drives utilise a different transfer protocol from hard drives, so any sharing between the two could potentially slow things down with two different protocols in action.
  • Two hard drives on one ATA100/133 channel have plenty of bandwidth to bandy around with - transfer rates rarely hit more than 30-40Mb/s.
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