123a34ab25fd
tech



Hello Roy - 

--8<--cut 

RJT>> Are these both ATA devices? 

CA>> Please excuse my ignorance but ATA _is_ the same as IDE
CA>> isn't it? If so, yes they are ATA. 

RJT> They are as far as I'm concerned, but there is some minor
RJT> distinction. I figured that if I'd said "IDE" then
RJT> somebody would have nit-picked that post... :-) 

I read up on this some time back. There is ATA and ATA 2 or
something like that? You see I try to avoid doing hardware as
much as possible and the time lapse between my 'research' and
the actual use of the information puts me at a disadvantage. :-\ 

RJT>> If so, are they connected to seperate cables? 

CA>> Good point. To be honest I've never checked but I will. :-) 

I checked - they are on seperate cables (controllers). 

RJT> I'm not remembering the details at the moment (still
RJT> recovering from a road trip here :-) but there's something
RJT> about that arrangement that provides better performance
RJT> than having two devices involved in some transfer both on
RJT> the same cable -- I think it was that the interface had to
RJT> wait for one device to finish up before it could issue a
RJT> command to the other, something like that. 

Sounds very logical to me. 

RJT>> It may be the hard drive, or it might be some other
RJT>> aspect of the system. 

I get the feeling the entire system has slowed a bit. I've
scanned for virus with AVG and AVAST, scanned for spyware with
SpyBot and AdAware (all recent versions and updated online),
plus I've scanned the registry with multiple apps to removed
leftover debris plus compressed the registry with NTREGOPT.
Still seems a bit slower than it was this time last year? 

I may be just imagining the 'slowness' since I was moving from
one machine to another and one was at 2.8 gHz and mine is at
450 mHz so ... 

CA>> I had 3 files of 640+meg to burn to CD and had to convert
CA>> them to ISO files then defrag the hard drive (4 times)
CA>> before I could get a successful CD burned. That this
CA>> helped at all tells me the hard drive is too slow or the
CA>> burner is wearing out. The burner has never been perfect
CA>> and has made it's share of coasters but now it's every
CA>> other use the copy fails. 

RJT> Although I have a burner here I haven't yet done too much
RJT> with it, so I'm still reading this stuff with interest.
RJT> It's installed in a linux workstation box, and I used it
RJT> as a regular CD reader to do the install -- and got a few
RJT> errors during that process. I'm hoping that it's not going
RJT> to be a problem for me when I do try and get around to
RJT> using it... 

RJT> So many project, never enough time! 

I have the time but some serious reluctance to dig too deep and
find myself with a 'career move' rather than an evenings
'project'. ;-) 

>
>        ,                          ,
>      o/      Charles.Angelich      \o       ,
>       __o/
>     / >          USA, MI           < \   __\__
 

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