[HN Gopher] The Dual-Drive IDE Hell
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The Dual-Drive IDE Hell
Author : userbinator
Score : 44 points
Date : 2021-08-26 04:20 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.os2museum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.os2museum.com)
| timw4mail wrote:
| I've generally had few issues with IDE hard drives and CDROM
| drives, from the Pentium era forward. The "fun" has been dealing
| with hard drive replacements, whether SD card or Compact flash.
| jandrese wrote:
| Oh yeah. IDE Master/Slave was pure voodoo. With hard drives it
| usually wasn't too bad, but ATAPI devices (CD-ROMs) were just
| insane. I saw everything from drives that wouldn't be recognized
| unless they were slave to a HDD, to drives that refused every
| configuration except being a slave drive with no master--which
| isn't supposed to work at all.
|
| Cable select sometimes worked, but I didn't trust it as much as
| the jumpers. I did try to match the jumpers with the position on
| the cable just to give myself a better chance of success.
|
| The article is correct that mixing drive brands, or even mixing
| drive eras was asking for trouble. Another fun aspect is when
| someone wanted to install more than 4 drives and had to use one
| of the ISA (later PCI) PATA cards. Those cards _never_ supported
| ATAPI devices in my experience, so there were some machines that
| booted off of a HDD hanging off of an ISA card so the 4 burners
| could be on the system controller.
|
| And don't even get me started on the godforsaken CMD640 that
| every damn manufacturer used for years.
| citrin_ru wrote:
| Maybe I started to use computers too late (my 1st HDD supported
| UDMA/33 or 66 AFAIR), but I don't remember any problems with
| master/slave. Just set jumpers and it works.
| codezero wrote:
| Yeah, I am not doubting the author at all, but I built a lot
| of computers for myself and others in the 90s, and maybe I
| just don't remember, or maybe I always had two cables, one
| for each drive, but I distinctly remember setting jumpers and
| it just worked. That said, I was using mostly Linux,
| sometimes Windows, so maybe this was an OS/2 thing?
|
| Something I do remember though, was having to get the blocks,
| cylinders, etc... manually when partitioning/formatting
| disks.
|
| I guess I got lucky with the drives I used, which back then
| would have mostly been Western Digital with a splash of
| Seagate, maybe because I didn't typically mix vendors in an
| initial build I just didn't run into these issues.
| throw0101a wrote:
| I found that, back in the day, simply buying Plextors was the
| simplest solution. For best results when burning, you'd want
| the optical drive to be the master device on the secondary IDE
| bus.
|
| Of course IDE only allowed two devices on a bus, with generally
| only two buses. If you wanted more you had to go with
| (parallel) SCSI, which allowed up to 8 IDs (one taken up by the
| controller) with the 8-bit bus, and up to 16 IDs on the 16-bit
| controller:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_high_byte_termination
|
| Just don't forget to put the properly-ohmed termination at the
| correct location on the cable.
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_SCSI
|
| There was folklore that said three terminations were needed to
| get things to work: two electrical, one on each end of the
| cable; and one termination of a rooster at midnight around five
| black candles.
| brudgers wrote:
| I could be mistaken, but I seem to remember adding additional
| drives using ISA IDE controller cards.
| Slartie wrote:
| > so the 4 burners could be on the system controller
|
| Oh those were the days, in which poor students financed their
| high-end IT equipment by selling "backup copies" of popular
| music albums, games and other software products on the school
| yard to their peers...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| By the time ATAPI was around (instead of proprietary CD-ROMs),
| all of my issues with 2 drives had gone away. You had to jumper
| them right (cable-select was always hit-or-miss for me, right
| up until SATA), but if you did that they worked just fine for
| me.
| vondur wrote:
| IDE Drives seemed plenty simple to me, coming from mostly using
| SCSI drives during that time.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I built a 2000-era PC a few years ago, and it brought back
| memories of how much I hated using/configuring IDE back in the
| day. I've had IDE drives become flaky for no obvious reason.
|
| SATA is such an advancement. For me, the only bad part about it
| is the mechanics of the cable itself (comes out too easy or too
| hard).
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| I was building PCs during this time. One thing I didn't see
| mentioned in TFA was that the 'master' (drive 0) MUST be located
| at the end of the cable. The 'slave' had to be in the middle.
|
| The jumpers were easy to figure out and not as complicated as the
| author makes out. Contrary to the experience that na85 had;
| "Cable Select" _never_ worked for me.
|
| Yes it was a time of chaos and frustration, but I learned more in
| that period then I did since then. Hard core hardware lessons.
|
| Note: most IRQ jumpers and motherboard jumpers were the same size
| as the drive jumpers. I was never at a loss for jumpers, but I
| did manage to lose them a lot.
| Neil44 wrote:
| Same, cable select was not worth messing with as it so rarely
| worked. Just set master/slave and be done with it. I agree with
| the other poster also that said CDROMS were the worst full
| stop.
| handrous wrote:
| > The jumpers were easy to figure out and not as complicated as
| the author makes out. Contrary to the experience that na85 had;
| "Cable Select" _never_ worked for me.
|
| I think every drive I encountered that was manufactured after
| the early 90s either had a printed diagram for the jumpers
| somewhere on it, or else had labels molded right in to the
| plastic case around the pins themselves. Only time it was hard,
| back when I used to tinker with computers a lot, was when I'd
| be messing with a junked 286 or something. Further, by the late
| 90s IIRC drives had begun to converge on a standard jumper
| layout.
| chaoticmass wrote:
| Used to work in a computer store in the early 2000's and 99% of
| the time when someone came in to return an IDE drive it was due
| to this problem.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Getting flashbacks. I'm glad SATA is a single device per
| cable/socket.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Does anyone chain SATAs in their home PC builds? Like IDEs it's
| been sold as a feature to SATA since the inception, but I always
| assumed that it was like IDE: a part of the protocol no SATA chip
| provider bothered to debug, or even implement.
|
| I think there were raid/NAS boxes that actually did it...
| gerdesj wrote:
| This is all from memory, so treat with caution.
|
| The S in SATA is serial. The older IDE jobs are PATA -
| parallel. Two PATA drive share the available bandwidth (for
| want of a better word) and multiple SATAs have all the
| bandwidth available simultaneously to each device.
|
| Copying from one PATA disk to another on the same bus is
| horrible - in out, in out shake it all about at a few 10s of
| MBs-1. Copying from one SATA to another runs at full speed.
|
| For real speed you need SSD and hardware RAID with whopping
| caches and a price to match. For huge storage, reliability and
| a fairly eye watering price, why not use SSD to cache fast SAS
| 2.5" spinning rust with a decent hardware RAID. Oh I've just
| started to specify a SAN/NAS!
| bombcar wrote:
| SAS allows "breakouts" and I think they may have updated SATA
| to allow something similar.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| SATA always supported port multipliers. Backblaze used them
| in the early days for their storage pods.
| na85 wrote:
| By the time I started building gaming PCs in the 90s, many drives
| had Cable Select settings on the jumper. It pretty much "just
| worked" for me.
| myself248 wrote:
| That is so bizarre, I built and tinkered with way too many
| machines in that era, and I only remember one combination that
| didn't work, two early ATAPI CDROMs on the same chain. Everything
| else, just get the jumpers right and it was good to go.
|
| This was mostly in the era of ISA and then VLB "Super-I/O" cards,
| so maybe mobos with integrated IDE are pickier?
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| > But there are also drives which cleverly combined the two
| standards for 2.54mm pitch and 0.5mm pins
|
| These would be 2.5mm pitch which is close enough to be semi-
| interoperable with 0.1".
| deckard1 wrote:
| This definitely isn't my recollection of the '90s. IDE just
| worked. Yes, you had to get the cable and jumpers correct. But it
| wasn't rocket science. It pales in comparison to the headache of
| MFM. I remember having to use the DOS DEBUG.COM and communicate
| directly with the controller card to get a low-level format. And
| two ribbon cables per drive. I had two MFM drives in an XT. Lord.
| Ribbon cables every goddamn where.
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(page generated 2021-08-26 23:00 UTC)