actually, ide drives always partially terminate the bus, master/slave has nothing to do with that. early on in the life of ide, the "master" drive would actually control the "slave" drive and it's data transfer to some extent, hence the "master"/"slave" designation system. on these systems, you had to have a master, and generally you wanted it to be the faster drive (microsponge actually spends a whole day on this absurdly complex subject as what's "optimum" and will work is often hard to guess at) as the pair will be no faster than the master. more recent implementations of ide access the slave drive in "master mode", and hence the master slave thing becomes meaningless other than being able to specify which drive on the bus you want, it becomes just an id# much like in scsi. the g4 digiatal audio, and i think all the newer macs do this. on my machine, it makes no difference which of the 2 drives i have as master or slave, i've tested the data flow and it's the same either way. actually, just because it doesn't matter and was how i had them after testing, my boot drive is actually the "slave", which you couldn't do on older implementations of ide. of course the drive itself has to support master mode when set as slave, but most modern drives will do that. if you pick up an old 40mb hard drive it probably won't work that way. (ah, the memories of working on a pc with a 40mb drive and having to do house cleaning constantly).
having said that, an add on ide card could be designed or misdesigned either way. as far as setting master/slave, there were a few silly people under the new specs that let the cable location designate which drive was which, but of course this means the jumpers have to be taken off both drives or you can have a conflict between what the cable thinks it wants and what the drive jumpers say. the selection has just been moved to a pin on the cable that wasn't used before, and because some silly people used it allot of cables are wired to do the choosing for you. i believe some drives can be told to ignore the silly cable and use the user jumper settings. Mark Benson wrote: ------- > In most cases Master/Single amounts to the same thing. Certainly on > Seagate, Fujitsu and Quantum hard disks anyway. I dunno about IBMs, I > never fitted a Deskstar. > > Does anyone actually know what the master/slave setting does (other > than tell it to be 1st or 2nd in line)? I always suspected it was a > subtle way of terminating the bus without telling anyone but i could be > very wrong seeing as, unless using CSEL (cable select mode) it doesn't > depend on location in the chain on older 40-contact cables. ----------- -- The right of citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible." --Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. Here it comes again <http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxmc042702.html><http://www.counterpunch.org/oden1.html> -- G-List is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- We have Apple Refurbished Monitors in stock! | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-List list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:g-list@;mail.maclaunch.com> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:g-list-off@;mail.maclaunch.com> For digest mode, email: <mailto:g-list-digest@;mail.maclaunch.com> Subscription questions: <mailto:listmom@;lemlists.com> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-list%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
