Hi. I was reading another topic and someone mentioned that if you have an IDE computer and couple a cd drive with a hard drive on each of the primary and secondary channels, that you'd get faster and more reliable ripping and encoding. And that you can have both drives going at the same time. Does this make any sense, or has this been tried? At least I think that was what he meant.

This was that thread:

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....l=radio+project

Thanks.

PATA channels are shared between the master and slave devices so if you can set up your system with your default data drive for music storage and your (favorite) ripping optical drive on separate channels that is best. Likewise if you have multiple harddrives putting them on separate channels improves the transfer rate between them. I've found it rather difficult to skip over devices with the flat IDE ribbons but you can manage sometimes. You might need to get some of the new factory rounded ones for an easier time.

Faster maybe, reliable no. PATA shares a channel between two drives, so they'll take turns writing to it. In practice this doesn't really matter since PATA is much, much faster then any drive, so theres bandwidth to spare.

Many optical drives don't even use UDMA4 (most modern ones go up to UDMA4), so that reduces even more the possibility of all of the PATA channel's bandwidth being used.