CD-Rom question
 

Hi,

I am putting together an old computer and have a CD Rom question. I slaved the CD-Rom with the hard drive. Would it be better to use another IDE cable and connect the CD-Rom to the secondary IDE plug on the motherboard?

Thanks

If you don't need to connect any other drives, yes. But it won't make much difference either way.

I use my HDD and DVD-RW on the same IDE cable and I had no problem yet

If you put them on separate IDE channels it can speed up transfer a little bit since you're not moving data both directions on the same one.

Ideally. Yes.

I'm trying to remember if IDE cables that are hooked up to a cd/dvd-rom drive limited to a maximum Ultra DMA mode 2?

If that was true, then you're HDD will have transfer rates of the same speed since the cable is shared with the cd/dvd-rom drive. However, it won't be the same if it were shared with another HDD. Most likely Ultra DMA Mode 5 or 6 will be used then instead of 2 (I'm not entirely sure if that's correct)

But it's always better to run those 2 seperately. It makes for best performance.

UDMA Mode 2 - 33.3MB/s
UDMA Mode 5 - 100MB/s

### Ultra DMA (UDMA) Modes ###