Need help here on optical drives

[Heinz2003]

Hey all

I currently have 2 optical drives connected as a slave and master on my primary ide channel and i am wanting to add another one to my secondary channel which already has the harddrive as the master but i cant get the ide cable to bend and connect to the optcial drive. What should i do? Also, which power connector do i use to connect, theres like 6 of em in my case. Thanks.

 

[buckmasterson]

Welcome to Anandtech Heinz!

Your hard drive should be on the primary, and the optical drives on the secondary. I would urge you to reconsider connecting anything else but another hard drive to your primary. Connecting an optical drive to the primary can slow the performance of your hard drive.

What are your system specs? What type of optical drives are we talking about?

I had a guy who insisted he needed his zip drive, despite the fact he had bought a very nice LG burner. I ended up buying a raid board and installing the drivers but not setting up the raid. I used 4 cables (DVD, CDBurner, Zip Drive & Hard Drive) to keep everyone away from each other, and he's tickled pink about it.

 

[ojai00]

To add onto buckmasterson's post, you can buy an IDE card that you can plug into your PCI slot and then plug your optical drive into that card. The power connector to plug into the optical drive should be the same one that you use to plug into your other optical drives and your hard drive. Hope this helps.

 

[thorin]

Originally posted by: buckmasterson
Welcome to Anandtech Heinz!

Your hard drive should be on the primary, and the optical drives on the secondary. I would urge you to reconsider connecting anything else but another hard drive to your primary. Connecting an optical drive to the primary can slow the performance of your hard drive.

Only if it's a older optical that operates in PIO Mode.

What are your system specs? What type of optical drives are we talking about?

Ya please give us more detail. What are the 3 opticals you want to have in your sys and why won't some combination of 2 of them fit your needs.

To Heinz's original question, you could:
1) Move the drives in to another configuration within the case so that the cable(s) fit.
2) Only use 2 optical drives (which should be more then enough for most people/circumstances).
3) Buy longer IDE cables.
4) Buy a PCI ATA controller and put all 4 devices on their own channels for optimal performance between all devices and use seperate cables (making them all master on seperate channels).

Thorin

 

[Heinz2003]

My stats on my pc are:
p4 2.4C with HT
Asus p4p-800 mobo
Kingmax 512 MB DDR memory
120 GB seagate barracuda HD
ATI AIW 9700 Pro video card
LG 16X dvd rom
LG 52X 32X 52X cd writer
LG 4X DVD writer

I want to have three optical drives because i want to be able to burn dvds with my dvd writer as well as burn cds with my cd writer at 52X.

 

[thorin]

Can't you burn CDRs with your DVDR ?

Thorin