Master/Slave setup vs Two seperate Hard Drives

[evac-q8r]

I have a Dell Dimension 8200 with a 40 GB Hardrive and I recently bought a 200 GB Western Digital HardDrive which came with its own controller card. The driver disk which came with the drive is only supported by Windows unfortunately. Therefore, I had to install the drive as a slave drive. What are the advantages of having a Master/Slave harddrive setup versus two harddrives the first connected to the motherboard and the second connected to the controller card. Peace.

[redcape]

There is no real advantage for most people. In theory it is better to have a single disk per channel because then the disk gets the full bandwidth of the channel. If you put them both on the same channel and try to use both harddisks simultaneously the channel might become saturated and you won't get maximum speed out of them.

However, the reason Western Digital supply a controller card is that most motherboard IDE controllers cannot handle disks that large. So it might not work without the card.

What sort of card is it? If it is a Promise it should work fine on Linux.

Do you only have one IDE channel on your motherboard? Most have two. But note: I have been told by people not to put a harddisk on the same channel as an ATAPI device (such as CDROM). I have no idea if there is any truth in that.

[rameyd]

As a further comment, I believe that the speed that an IDE channel can function at is limited to the speed of the slowest item on the channel. Therefore, for a CDRom and HardDrive to exist on the same channel, the traffic must operate at the speed of the CDRom (ATA 33 in most cases), while the Hard Drive may be capable of up ATA 133.

Some of the more spacious WD Hard Drives are ATA133, and the card may be provided to allow you to use the full access speed.

As a final comment, both are modern HD's and may well coexist nicely, but the best option is to have devices on there own channel until this is no longer an option.

Dough

[evac-q8r]

I have another question concerning this setup. My BIOS is not recognizing the second drive and therefore when I try booting into Linux which is installed on that drive GRUB complains with Error 21: Device does not exist. I created a boot disk and I can boot from floppy just fine onto Linux on hard drive 2, but when trying to boot from off disk I get problems.

[DMR]

As redcape said, the controller card might work with Linux, especially if the card is made by Promise. Have you tried it at all?

Originally posted by evac-q8r
I have another question concerning this setup. My BIOS is not recognizing the second driveA BIOS upgrade might fix that; check the BIOS manufacturer's support site or contact them directly to find out. Also double-check to make sure you have the Master/Slave jumpers on each drive set correctly.

Originally posted by evac-q8r
when I try booting into Linux which is installed on that drive GRUB complains with Error 21: Device does not exist.Boot into Linux from your floppy and post the contents of the following two files:

/boot/grub/grub.conf
/boot/grub/device.map