I have purchased a dvd+-RW but my system already has a dvd-rom and cd-rw. I would like to use all 3 if it was at all possible to save the life span of the drives. Can it be done, have 3 internal optical drives and if so could you explain how or give a link to a tuturial, Any help is good help. Thank you in advance for taking the time to read this!
Assuming that you only have one harddrive then it can be done. The quick of it is that motherboards come with two IDE channels and on each channel you can connect 2 devices for a total of four (i.e., 1 harddrive + 3 optical drives). Some boards also have a RAID controller allowing you to connect 4 more devices to your system. Now if you dont have an onboard RAID controller and/or have more than 1 harddrive then I'd reccomend you grab yourself a plain old ATA133 controller (something like http://www.everbest.on.ca/ver2/showProduct.php?id=69 ). At least with Maxtor, with their 80G+ 7200rpm drives they (used to) give out free IDE controllers like the one shown above... dunno if they still do that or not
I have heard that haveing more than 2 cd or dvd drives slows your system right down if you do not have more than 2 edi ports on your motherboard?Is there any truth in this Praetor.
Theoretically true only when you are doing simultaneous accesses to both optical and hard disks simultaneously (i.e., copying from Primary Slave (CD) to Primary Master (HDD) will be limited to ATA33). I have observed however in practise, there isnt damn near any difference as to whether you share the same chain or not (i used to have HDD-CD, HDD-DVD but now I have HDD-HDD, CD-DVD and dont notice damn near anything). I suspect a lot of it is theoretical and "benchmarks" (which are overrated anyways)
Thanks for the advice Praetor. I have 2 hdds 120 gigs each not set up on a raid system. I will look into trying out the controller card, other than that I'll leave the cd-rw off for now. The problem was even with firmware update the lame LG burner I grabbed didn't want to read a data back up I made a year ago, sorta freaked me out because I thought I lost the data but when I used the dvd-rom to read it, it was all there. What do I expect, I got my LG burner for cheap and its the latest model, it was the price that grabbed me or I would still be doing the cd-r thing. Thanks again.
I wish you the best of luck.... LG burners are cheap for a reason hehe. Ive had my share of failed LG drives hehe
