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Friday, February 11, 2005

CS I Love You
I promise, this will be my last bit of shameless self-promotion... My new desktoppipeline.com column is up. Nothing earth-shaking unless you've always wondered about the difference between cable select (CS) and Master/Slave hard drive settings.
# Permalink Posted at 6:27 AM 6 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

Bill - why doesn't SATA allow for more than one drive on a SATA cable?(I set up my 10,000rpm SATA boot drive on an Adaptec SATA PCI card, with a 7,200 rpm SATA drive for data files. Unfortunately, the PCI card has only 2 SATA slots. If I want a 3rd or 4th drive for data, I have to buy a 2nd PCI card. Doesn't seem very efficient.)

# posted by Jason in Oregon 11:50 AM

Bill-
How come this article doesn't show up on the How-To page (resulting from clicking on the HOW-TO icon in the desktoppipeline.com top page)?

# posted by Anonymous 12:33 PM

Jason, two reasons...

1. The dedicated link approach eliminates the arbitration delays sometimes associated with shared bus topologies.

2. The Serial ATA (SATA) specification, called Serial ATA 1.0, or SATA150, was introduced in 2001.

3. IDE had provisions for only two hard drives. The secondary IDE port was relegated to slower ATA devices.

# posted by Bill 12:48 PM

Todd, you'd have to ask Barbara Krassnoff...

# posted by Bill 12:49 PM

Said by bill "CS has always been the preferred way to set up drives"
I take exception to this statement I put together a lot of computers in the late 80's to mid 90's that didn't have such a thing as cable select. When cable selct did first start showing up on drive it didn't work well.
I am an old dog and will stay with master slave jumpering.

# posted by alex 9:21 PM

Alex, I'm sure you're an exceptional person by nature. However, if you read the column a little more carefully, you'll see the answer to your question: CS has almost always been on the drives. Unfortunately, the 40-pin cables we used prior to ATA100 only vaguely supported it, if at all.

# posted by Bill 6:21 PM

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