General Knowledge

Enverex

I'd rather have solid answers on these so please refrain from any "Oh, well I think that...".

I'm doing some courses right now and the answers to some of the questions bother me. They may be right, I'd just like to set everything in stone so here are the ones that are nagging me.

Does a motherboard normally have 1 or 2 IDE controlers? I've always thought it was one controler with 2 ports, each capable of supporting 2 drives (this NF3 Motherboard only reports a single controler too).

This one bothered me too:
"You are about to install an IDE CD-ROM drive in a user's computer. Upon opening the system case, you see that the user has two hard disks attached to the Primary IDE controller. Which actions are necessary to install the CD-ROM drive?"

Your options are (you have to select 2 of them):
Set the CD-ROM drive jumpers to "master".
Obtain a second IDE cable.
Uprgade the power supply.
Move the slave hard drive to the Secondary IDE controller.

Now I selected to Obtain a second IDE cable & Move the slave hard drive to the Secondary IDE controller as no-one in their right mind would have two Hard-Drives on the same IDE cable when they could put one on one and one on another.

So yeah... opinions on those?

CB

For number one:

A mother board technically has no IDE controllers. In fact, there is no such thing. IDE controller is a misnomer. Motherboards have one ATA host adapter/interface, which allows the builder to connect HD assemblies to the MB with ribbon cables.

Older computers used to have a bult in HD controller on the MB, but it is no longer done that way.

The whole point of the ATA system is so that we don't need controllers on the MB anymore, because those were proprietary, so you would have to have the same brand MB as HD. The controllers are on a circuit board attached to the drive instead. This is what the ATA cable plugs into


For number two:

If those are your only options, and you must pick two, then you are correct.

The problem with the question is that many Gurus beleive it to be best to put both HDs on one cable, and put the CD-ROMs on the other cable, so that one device doesn't slow down the other. There seems to be no right answer, as you will find just as many experts who tell you to always put your HDs on the same cable, as you will find experts who tell you to never do such a thing.

If I was answering the question, I would have circled only 'Obtain a second IDE cable', even if the directions said to circle another-one. (and even though it is actually called an ATA cable)

deicist

The controller issue is sort of ambiguous, technically there are usually two controllers, a primary and a secondary each of which can support two drives.... but those two controllers are usually on one chip, which may be where you're getting confused.

on the CD-ROM drive question you have two options (as I see it) you can move the slave hard drive and obtain a second IDE cable.... or you can obtain a second IDE cable and set the CD-ROM drive jumpers to master before installing it on the secondary controller. Personally I'd go for the second option, having the optical drive on it's own is the better option (IMO).

GHoosdum

For the first question, deicist is correct. The Primary and Secondary IDE controllers both reside on one chip, which is usually part of the Southbridge chip.

As for the second question, I think only one of those answers is 100% correct, and that is "Obtain a second IDE cable." (assuming that no optical drives are in the PC already) - I'd also say that either "Set the CD-ROM drive jumpers to "master"." or "Move the slave hard drive to the Secondary IDE controller." could also be correct, but personally I'd just leave the CD-ROM as "Cable select" and put it on the master plug of the IDE cable, which I'd plug into the secondary IDE controller slot. I'd also leave the slave HDD where it is, since I like to have HDDs on one IDE channel, and optical drives on the other.

TheBaron

however, many people on CDFreaks will tell you that a lot of problems that occur with DVD+-RW drives occur due to DMA issues, and a lot of those can be fixed by correctly arranging your drives due to, I believe, DMA priority. confusing stuff to be sure

TheLostSwede

There are just one controller on a standard mainboard, but usually, it has 2 channels. Primary and secondary. Both primary and secondary each have a master and a slave. One channel cannot both be read by and written to at the same time. Thats' why you need to have one atapi on each channel to make a direct copy of the cd/dvd.

To be sure to have stability, i'd choose 2 hdd on one channel and the atapi/atapis on the other. As someone else said above, some people claims that it's faster too. The general opinion is that Each channel on IDE is as fast as the slowest connected device. As you know, ATAPI is only UDMA 2 with a max burst speed of 33mb/s and ATA 100 is UDMA 5 with a max burst speed of 100mb/s.

The best way to test the speed is to install a game from a cd to a hdd on the same channel, eg: the hdd as master and the atapi as the slave. It'll take forever in comparison to if the 2 devices where on different channels.

For file transfering, it's obviously the best to have 2 hdd's on different channels as you said Enverex, but most of us can't have the best out of 2 worlds unless we have a 3:rd party device such as an extra ide controller. If you only install software to one of the hdd's from the atapi, the obvious choice would be to have one atapi and one hdd on the secondary controller and the system hdd on the primary if you install everything on the system disk. This often leads to instability issues though.

This is alsy why Tex will chime in here and rave about the scsi controllers since the chain of devices can be both written to and read by at the same time.

CB

Are you trying to say that there is such a thing as an IDE controller?

I guess I'm batting zero today...

TheLostSwede

That's at least what the mainboard manufacturers call it....well...in this case, it's called ata.

CB

From howstuffworks.com

IDE was created as a way to standardize the use of hard drives in computers. The basic concept behind IDE is that the hard drive and the controller should be combined. The controller is a small circuit board with chips that provide guidance as to exactly how the hard drive stores and accesses data. Most controllers also include some memory that acts as a buffer to enhance hard drive performance.

Before IDE, controllers and hard drives were separate and often proprietary. In other words, a controller from one manufacturer might not work with a hard drive from another manufacturer. The distance between the controller and the hard drive could result in poor signal quality and affect performance. Obviously, this caused much frustration for computer users.


The birth of the IDE interface led to combining a controller like this one with a hard drive.

IBM introduced the AT computer in 1984 with a couple of key innovations.

* The slots in the computer for adding cards used a new version of the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus. The new bus was capable of transmitting information 16 bits at a time, compared to 8 bits on the original ISA bus.
* IBM also offered a hard drive for the AT that used a new combined drive/controller. A ribbon cable from the drive/controller combination ran to an ISA card to connect to the computer, giving birth to the AT Attachment (ATA) interface.

In 1986, Compaq introduced IDE drives in their Deskpro 386. This drive/controller combination was based on the ATA standard developed by IBM. Before long, other vendors began offering IDE drives. IDE became the term that covered the entire range of integrated drive/controller devices. Since almost all IDE drives are ATA-based, the two terms are used interchangeably

GHoosdum

There's a difference between a the controller for the drive itself and an IDE/ATA controller. The controller card for the drive is on the drive, yes, but the SATA or IDE controller itself must be a part of the motherboard so that the motherboard can communicate with that type of device.

CB

It's not called a controller, though, cause it doesn't control anything...

/me goes back to howthingswork.com, cause he loves that site...

Here, this is what I was trying to say:

from howstuffworks.com

Most motherboards come with an IDE interface. This interface is often referred to as an IDE controller, which is incorrect. The interface is actually a host adapter, meaning that it provides a way to connect a complete device to the computer (host). The actual controller is on a circuit board attached to the hard drive. That's the reason it's called Integrated Drive Electronics in the first place!

Enverex

Only one shown for me.

Anyway, the reason I bought all this up is basically I got marked down for answering these questions "wrongly" although A seems like a matter of opinion and B seems like no-one can decide what is what.

GHoosdum

CBDroege wrote:

It's not called a controller, though, cause it doesn't control anything...

*CBDroege goes back to howthingswork.com, cause he loves that site...

Here, this is what I was trying to say:

from howstuffworks.com

I'm having trouble believing that howstuffworks.com could be more correct on this topic than all of the chipset manufacturers and motherboard manufacturers - the ATA or IDE controllers in the device manager are called "controllers" by by their manufacturers, rather than simply "interface" or "host adapter"...