Re: [tlug] Master and slave

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

On Monday 19 May 2003 09:16, Michael Engel wrote:

> I was told adding a CDROM (or DVD) as primary slave would slow down the
> harddisk access.

That is correct, and having another disk as secondary slave will also do that,
possibly even worse on average than having a CD or DVD drive as secondary
slave.  While a CD is much slower than a disk drive, it's accessed (usually)
much less often than a disk would be.  IDE/ATA does not allow simultaneous
access by more than one device, so if the disk is active the CD has to wait,
and vice versa (compare to SCSI, which does provide for simultaneous access;
ATA 133 drives may have individual throughput on a par with all but the
fastest individual SCSI drives, but the real-world throughput of SCSI is still
better for this reason).

Unless there is some missing context, the SuSE handbook you referenced
appears to be wrong on this point, and whether it is Windows or not
has no bearing; it's a matter of how the ATA bus works.

Jonathan

Attachment: pgp00052.pgp
Description: signature