Can I attach 3 devices to motherboard??

Leeray3

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Basically the motherboard I have is the ASRock K7S8X.
I have a 120gig hard drive connected
I have a CD Writer connected
I also have a DVD Writer connected.

My question is can I attach another CD/DVD drive to this motherboard.
Basically this is for cloning direct from one drive to the other instead of saving to my hard drive then transfering to DVD/CD.

Is this possible?

If it is would it slow down my hard drive at all?

Thanks
 
Not having checked, but I'd be astonished if it were otherwise, I presume your mobo has the standard two IDE channels, meaning you can have 4 devices, 2 on each channel .. in which case then yes, you have one spare position.

It would theoretically slow the hard disk down and you wouldn't ideally want to be ripping DVDs to the disk from the DVD on the same channel, however in normal or even heavy use use you'd be hard pushed to notice the difference.
 
Yes, you can connect it as "slave" on the 2nd IDE connector (the one with your HDD) but it will slow down that channel.

Someone said recently that it wouldn't have any effect but I still believe it will slow down access speeds to/from your HDD. IDEs only operate at the speed of the slowest attached device.

Worth checking.

:smoke:
 
The DVD on my disk channel allows the disk to run at its' native UDMA 5 speed, AFAIK all DVD drives will .. is that not true?
 
So where are we with this?
Will it slow down dramatically or not.
The thing is I am doing a lot of editing on my system so I don't really want to slow it down at all.
 
Go into Device Manager and check to see the I/O modes your IDE devices are running in, specifically the DVD and hard disk. If they're both the same, on one of my systems both are UDMA 5 then the DVD drive you have wouldn't have an effect.

Alternatively why not suck it and see! Move the DVD drive to the same channel as the hard disk and then try running some disk-intensive programs and see it it makes a difference. Ultimately theoretical performance hits are irrelevant if your machine usage doesn't result in any practical problems.

I can offer no more thoughts, if Kramer is right then maybe not all DVD drives are like mine, but then again even if they're not practical results are still the final arbiter ... while having 133Mb burst speed is a nice willy-wave you'll never see it in the real-world, outside artificial benchmarks. :)
 

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