Page 1 of Second Hard Drive - what`s the difference between cable select and slave ?

Just about to wack in a 2nd HDD. The PC`s ( a Hewlett Packard jobbie) manual says use cable select, yet the installation instructions for the Seagate don`t appear to recommend this, but say set jumpers to slave. Am now confused, so any advice would be appreciated please. :/

JF

The ide cable in the computer that you plug it into, has 2 bits to plug in, one on the end, and one halfway down it. Your existing hdd is likely to be plugged into the one on the end. I THINK that if both hdds were set to cable select then the one on the end would be the master, and the one halfway down would be the slave.

I would reccomend setting the new one to slave, but make sure that the existing one is set to master and not cable select.



...look into my eyes

Using cable select, the position of the hard drive connections on the cable determines which is master and which is slave rather than the traditional method of specifically setting the jumpers on the hard drives to master or slave.

Cable select is also slightly quicker too because with the older configuration, the motherboard communicates with the master drive first and then passes the commands on to the slave. Also the "Drive Active" signal applies to both drives so if one is busy the other has to wait. With cable select the IDE controller can select either drive directly, even if the other is busy.

Having said that, IDE controllers are so fast these days that the performance from the processes known as "Command Overlap" and "Data Interleave" is not really noticeable with Cable Select over the traditional method of explicitly setting a master and slave system. It is more of a reliabilty issue than a performance issue because Cable Select is less prone to the hard discs hanging.

Oh by the way, the Seagate drive is fine as Cable Select and that`s the better route to take.

This item was edited on Thursday, 23rd June 2005, 18:24