backup & low downtime for home network

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 10:09:51AM -0500, Chris Aitken wrote:
> That I did not know. I am doing the hard drive installations now. So, I 
> should put one drive on one IDE cable (I guess we call that IDE1) and 
> the other on the other cable (IDE2)? So, then do I jumper them both as 
> "Single/Master", "Master" or what? I guess each hard drive will be 
> Master on it's respective IDE cable and the DVD burner and CD-ROM as 
> Slave. In the past I've not put CD drive and hard drive on the same 
> cable because I hear that data transfer speed will dumb down to the CD 
> drive speed. Will this affect me or only when I'm actually /using/ the 
> CD-ROM or DVD drive?

Unless you have an ancient IDE controller, it will be able to run each
drive at full speed.  Also all newer CD and DVD writers support bus
disconnect so that when they are doing a long command they disconnect
from the IDE bus and let other commands happen until they are done.  Old
CD-ROM drives and writers would lock the BUS while doing commands (so a
2 minute erase operation would lock up the IDE channel for 2 minutes).

As for jumpers, I just run cable select on everything.  That way the
driver at the end of the cable (for 80wire cables, which everything
ought to be using by now anyhow) will be master, and the one on the
middle connector is the slave.  If you are using old 40wire cables, then
set master and slave on the drives appropriately.

Of course if you really care about performance, buy another IDE
controller.  My home machine has 3 IDE controllers.  One add in card,
one in the chipset, and one extra controller on the main board, so I
could run 12 drivers if I wanted to, but I only ever run one per
channel, which currently is 2 x 80GB, 1 x 250GB, 1 x 500GB, 1 x DVD-ROM
and 1 x CD-RW.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists