> Here is the config a) Two hard disks, 1 disk PATA, 1 disk SATA and
> 1 CD/DVD Read/write PATA. That means that between the PATA devices,
> one becomes master, the other the slave. The USB backup device I had
> had a IDE (PATA) drive, and it needs to use drive select to determine
> if it is to emulate a master or a slave. The interface tries one or
> the other and fails, or collided with the state of the CD/DVD, ergo
> problems. Sometimes the drive would lock up, other times it would be
> slow. When I unplugged the IDE hard disk, this freed up a line for
> master/slave, and my external hard disk just worked normally. When
> I repowered the device, but removed the CD/DVD ROM from the bios, the
> USB drive worked OK. Based on my experimentation, I believe that the
> USB driver builds a bridge to the IDE device driver interface. Any
> IDE command gets transfered via the USB port to the external drive.
The USB drive's internal protocol (SATA or PATA) is unrelated to the
PATA or SATA interfaces you have on your motherboard, so the removal of
the CD/DVD from the bios should not have any effect on the performance
of your USB drive and if it does have an effect, it would be the same
effect whether that USB drive uses PATA or SATA internally.
The USB driver doesn't know/care that the disk it's talking to is a PATA
harddrive rather than a flash key. The only case where the difference
shows up is when you try to use hdparm and smartctl on it, where some
USB drives provide some way to tunnel ATA commands over the USB protocol
to the actual drive, but for normal access only the standard
hardware-agnostic UMS (USB Mass Storage) protocol is used.
Stefan
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