First post, by canadaboy25
Hi all, I feel like this question has to have been asked/answered before, but I have searched online as well as on this forum and not found an answer to my specific question.
I have an ABit KT7A RAID board that I use for testing/development as well as HDD cloning. As such, I end up installing and removing HDDs quite often. I like to be able to just place the HDD under test on the desk beside the tower without mounting it inside. I am running a main disk with XP/Linux dual boot as well as a CDROM drive. Currently I have the main disk as primary master and CDROM as secondary master. The problem is connecting another disk to be tested or cloned. I either have to install it in the case and configure it as a slave, or pull the cable from the internal HDD or CDROM depending on what I'm doing. I hate doing this as pulling and installing the IDE cable from the board and/or drives has to be hard on the cables and connectors.
Obviously the simple solution would be to have the main HDD as primary master and CDROM as primary slave, leaving the secondary IDE channel for whatever disk I am testing/cloning. The problem is that my case (and pretty much any other case from the era) has the 5.25" bays on the top, and the 3.5" bays on the bottom. This makes it impossible to get the IDE cable connected with HDD as master. Annoyingly, the KT7A RAID has the two additional IDE channels but they are pretty much unusable since drivers need to be installed which don't exist for linux.
I could connect the main HDD as slave and CDROM as master which would allow me to connect the cable, but this goes against the traditional rule of thumb of HDD as master. If I do this, is there actually any performance difference between having the HDD as master or slave (assuming no data is being read or written to the CDROM drive at the time). How would you deal with this issue?
