Slaving drives

[scf3]

I have two IBM drives one for gs and one for
samples. I also have cd rom and zip disc in my computer each slaved to one of the hard drives.
Is there some way I can configure my system so that nothing is slaved to the drive I am using for my .gig files?

Thanks,

Steve Fawcett

[Jamieh]

Steve, I don\'t know exactly how your system is set up, but I will describe my system to you. I\'m assuming you are using IDE drives?

I have two IDE channels in my computer, channel 0 and channel 1. On channel 0 I have my main HD as the master and my GIGS HD as the slave. On the channel 1 I have my DVD drive as the master and my CDRW as the slave.

I suggest keeping the CD drives on a different channel than the HD, especially if you have ATA-100 or other fast-bus HDs. Supposedly having a CD drive on the same IDE channel can reduce performance.

This is assuming your system has multiple IDE channels, which is pretty standard I believe. Trace the cable from the drives back to your motherboard--there should be two IDE cables coming off the board.

Hope this helps--I\'m not an expert at this as I was just figuring this stuff out earlier this week.

[GigaBeliever2]

\"I have two IDE channels in my computer, channel 0 and channel 1. On channel 0 I have my main HD as the master and my GIGS HD as the slave. On the channel 1 I have my DVD drive as the master and my CDRW as the slave.\"

From what I understand you will get better performance if you have your main HD and your GIGS HD on separate channels. What happens with both drives on the same IDE channel is that only one drive gets access to the IDE channel at one time, so you can\'t read or write simultaneously to the 2 drives at once.

I guess when you\'re loading GIGS you might not be using your main HD at the same time, but the main HD has your OS on it and Windows at least likes to access itself alot. I have personally found that the HD with the OS on it runs alot slower since the OS keeps accessing the drive. So I have an OS drive, a program drive, and a gigs drive and that seems to work well, but maybe that\'s overkill.

But you\'re right, copying from a DVD drive to a hard drive on the same channel will be slow because of the reason mentioned above. One solution I myself am eyeing are the motherboards with 4 IDE channels built in!

To answer Steve, the only way to have your GIG drive not have a slave attached to it when you have 4 IDE devices and 2 IDE channels (2 devices per channel) is to get more IDE channels. You can either get a 4 IDE channel motherboard or buy the Promise PCI IDE card which gives you 2 more IDE Channels. I was using the Promise card for my Athlon system, but I ended up with some corrupted GIGS. Supposedly not all Athlon motherboards work well with the Promise card, but I think it works much better with Intel systems. If you do get the Promise card, Nemesys recommends NOT putting your GIG drive on the Promise IDE channels since the Promise card is limited by the PCI bus. So I guess stick your DVD and CD-RW drives on the Promise card...

I hope I was helpful in someway.

Happy Jamming...

[Jamieh]

GigaBeliever, you are probably right that if you have your two drives on different channels you will have better performance. However, if the choice is between having each drive on a channel with the CD-ROM or having the two drives on the same channel and the CD-ROMs on the other channel I think you are better off keeping the CD-ROMS away from the Drives.

Having 4 IDE channels would probably be ideal.

[Jamieh]

Well, here is the word straight from the Nemesys Newsletter:

We recommend a second
hard drive dedicated to GIG files and audio data. The boot drive (C:\\)
should have the OS and GigaStudio programs on it and should be the
primary IDE master with the CD-ROM drive as the primary IDE slave. The
GIG drive should be the secondary IDE master drive. This will greatly
improve the performance of your GigaPiano samples with increased
polyphony of your sample playback. The reason for this is that the OS
and programs make calls to the hard drive and create a significant
amount of bi-directional traffic across the IDE bus. Having a second
hard drive on a separate bus will free up the bandwidth for streaming
sample data directly off the secondary IDE bus.

Sounds like you should try to keep the GIGS drive as the primary on the other IDE channel. Their system only has one CD-ROM though--I wonder what they suggest for my system with a DVD drive and a CDRW?