There are two IDE interrupts, normally IRQ 14 & 15. These interrupts are shared between ATA (IDE HD) and ATAPI (DVD/CD drives). If a slave device wants the interrupt, it must wait for the master device to release the interrupt. Because of intolerance to latency, the high data rates of DVD demand both the HD and the DVD reconfigured as masters. The boot drive must be configured as the primary master as well.
These constraints lead to only one compromise configuration:
Boot HD = Primary master DVD write = Secondary Master DVD read = Primary slave 2nd HD = Secondary slave
In this configuration you may read from either the boot HD (C:) or the DVD reader (copying). You may not use the second HD as a source or used the primary slave as a writer.
Any other configuration has problems. I'll bet you are using an alternate configuration now.
If you want to use two DVD writers you must use SCSI HDs.
Fred Townsend
Steffen Maisch wrote:
Hello! I'm not sure, whether this is the right topic here, but maybe there's an expert in computer hardware... I have two DVD recorders in my computer (P4; 2.6Ghz; 1.5GB RAM). The OS (Win 2000) boots from a RAID controller, the data I want to record on DVD are on another IDE harddisk, connected to the IDE bus of the mainboard, one of the two DVD recordes is connected to the other DE bus of the mainboard, and the other recorder to a PCI-card IDE controller. When I start recording at high speed (e. g. 8*DVD or 44*CD), everything is right for some seconds. Then I get buffer underrun. The CPU utilisation behaves very strange: First it's around 20%, then starting oscillating between 0% and 100%, while buffer content also oscillates and finally causes an underrun. Simultanousely running a program with quite high CPU usage makes things better!!! But not always. If it is possible preventing CPU usage from oscillating, then it'll always prevent underrun completely. E. g. watching TV in full frame with a PCI tuner card on the same computer while writing to DVD is sometimes a solution. Copying the other way from DVD to harddisk with the same drives is no problem at all; CPU utilisation keeps very small and copying in this direction is very fast. Also copying from HD to HD achieves nearly 100MB/s!!! Does anyone have an idea what can cause this?
-- Author: Fred Townsend INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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