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itistoday · Feb 13, 2005, 05:41 PM

So, for the past couple of months, the hard drive that came with my mac has been making lots of noise (the churning sound) at even small tasks like opening directories. I've had this thing for over 2 years now and so I was starting to be afraid of it crashing on me. Here was what my setup was previously:

The PowerMac MDD has 4 spots for hard drives. 2 on ATA 100, and 2 on ATA 66. I had 2 hard drives on the ATA 100: my boot drive (the noisy one), and a new Western Digital as a slave drive (for media).

Now I went out and bought myself another Western Digital 80 GB, and installed it on the ATA 66 cable. It is the only drive on that cable. I then used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy my stuff from my noisy drive to the new WD (it worked great!)

Now, my question is this: Since currently my new boot drive is booting through an ATA 66 channel, should I switch the two drives (the old one on ATA 100 with this one)? Is there any speed improvement by doing this?

Detrius · Feb 13, 2005, 07:50 PM

In theory, there may be a speed hit, arguably. When you have two drives on one ATA bus, you take a speed hit, specifically when you are access both at the same time. Assuming you have a lot of RAM, I would put the drive most often accessed on the ATA100 bus by itself.

BTW, did you run any tests on the noisy drive to see if it's just noisy or if it really is failing? If you don't have TTP4, you can boot into OS 9 and use Drive Setup Utility to run a surface scan (it's in the menu as "test disk").

d_oob · Feb 13, 2005, 08:21 PM

I have 3 Ultra ata100 drives in my Dual 867 too. 2 on the ata100 cable and 1 on the ata66 cable. If I were to move one of the drives from the ata100 cable to the ata66 cable, making it so there is just 1 drive on the ata100 cable, you are saying this will make things a bit quicker? Will the drive connected Internally on the ata66 bus still be faster than having it Externally via Firewire? If it is slower on the ata66 bus than I'm better off accessing the drive via firewire right?

Maybe this will solve my slow startup times too!?

itistoday · Feb 13, 2005, 08:24 PM

Originally posted by Detrius:
In theory, there may be a speed hit, arguably. When you have two drives on one ATA bus, you take a speed hit, specifically when you are access both at the same time. Assuming you have a lot of RAM, I would put the drive most often accessed on the ATA100 bus by itself.

BTW, did you run any tests on the noisy drive to see if it's just noisy or if it really is failing? If you don't have TTP4, you can boot into OS 9 and use Drive Setup Utility to run a surface scan (it's in the menu as "test disk").

Well, in the current setup I'm using my Media hard drive (the other WD on the ATA 100) as both a storage drive, and my swap drive. I do have TTP4, but am too lazy to run a surface scan as that takes a really long time. I don't think there are any problems with the drive; it's just really noisy, and sucks compared to the WD. I was also thinking, that probably the ideal solution would be to put my main drive by itself onto the ATA 100, and the other two onto the 66... The question is, will there actually be a speed boost?

itistoday · Feb 13, 2005, 08:32 PM

Originally posted by d_oob:
I have 3 Ultra ata100 drives in my Dual 867 too. 2 on the ata100 cable and 1 on the ata66 cable. If I were to move one of the drives from the ata100 cable to the ata66 cable, making it so there is just 1 drive on the ata100 cable, you are saying this will make things a bit quicker? Will the drive connected Internally on the ata66 bus still be faster than having it Externally via Firewire? If it is slower on the ata66 bus than I'm better off accessing the drive via firewire right?

Maybe this will solve my slow startup times too!?

Well, I think that either ATA will be faster than firewire, but having two drives on one cable means that if they are both being actively used, your speeds will be cut in half basically. So if both of the drives on your ATA 100 are actively used I would put one on the ATA 66, and the main one on the ATA 100.

Detrius · Feb 15, 2005, 08:41 PM

Originally posted by itistoday:
Well, I think that either ATA will be faster than firewire, but having two drives on one cable means that if they are both being actively used, your speeds will be cut in half basically. So if both of the drives on your ATA 100 are actively used I would put one on the ATA 66, and the main one on the ATA 100.

It's a little worse than that, as the master drive has to control the slave drive. The only way to know for sure is to benchmark a slave drive on the ATA66 bus and compare it to the same drive running by itself on the FireWire bus. If it's pretty much the same, you will be better off on the FireWire bus--assuming there is nothing else on FireWire.

As far as where to put your boot drive, I would think this may depend on how much RAM you have. If you boot and launch applications from a slower drive/bus, then these tasks would take longer. If you have a LOT of RAM, then once you have read this information, it will stay in RAM. But if you have a lot of RAM, it doesn't matter where your swap is either.