Hi guys, I wanted to know is there any effects of using a single IDE to connect the hdd and cdrom? i.e does it slow the transfer rate of data? Or is it best to use a separate ide cable for the hdd and cdrom? let us know ur thoughts much appreciated regards, n@z

Hi, If you have just one hard drive and one cd, put them on seperate IDEs. eg. hard drive (master) primary ide cd-rom (master)secondary ide

Hmmm, my dell came with one cable...and it's pretty fast - I assume they would use two cables if it was faster/matters ? I would bet it depends on the configuration and components...

hi, i should expand on what i said. you will have np running them on one, and dell,hp ect. will put them on one, but, a power-user can end up using a combo of programs that might have data moving to or from both cd and hd. this would be a "slow down", that would not happen if they were seperate. cost... 1 cable

All of these "follow ups" have neglected to mention the actual reasons for not putting a CD-ROM and a hard disk drive on the same IDE channel. Basically, there are 4 different speeds at which IDE/ATA devices can work. Standard ATA works at 33, and is all you will get if you use a 40-conductor cable. Even if you have a brand new ATA-133 hard drive, it'll only work at 33. Thus, to acheive any speed over 33, you'll need an 80-conductor cable. These are supplied in decently built systems to the hard drive. However, if you haven't received one of these you can buy one from your local computer store for five bucks-ish. Now, the effects of using and IDE cable for both the HDD and the CD-ROM is that YOUR DEVICES WILL ONLY WORK AS SLOWLY AS THE WEAKEST LINK. So, if you have a 40-Conductor cable, everything will work at 33 -- max, no matter what you do. If you have a CD-ROM on an 80-conductor cable with an ATA-100 hard drive, the hard drive will only work at 33. ALL CD-ROM DRIVES, BURNERS AND MOST DVD-ROMS WORK AT 33. Only absolute top-of-the-range will work at higher rates. If you have 2 ATA-100 drives on an 80-conductor cable and the motherboard is at least ATA-100 compatible (or, the IDE socket on the motherboard is), both drives will work at ATA-100. Thanks.

"If you have a CD-ROM on an 80-conductor cable with an ATA-100 hard drive, the hard drive will only work at 33." this is wrong.........An ATA100 HD on the same IDE channel as say a CDROM will decrease in speed slightly if you have a fairly recent MOBO.BUT no way will it drop to 33...this used to happen with older MOBO not anymore with the newer ones that are capable of 2 speeds on the same channel. It still is not recommended to do this because the ATA100 will run slower then its intended speed but will not drop to 33. peter

just wanna confirm... an udma/33 hard disk and and a cd-rom drive on a single cable is good?