Primary/slave relationships on mobo for HTPC?

[rotaryracer]

I'm going to be building an HTPC using an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. The board has two Ultra ATA133 ports on it (as well as SATA which I won't be using immediately). I plan to install (2) 160GB ATA133 hard drives, a CDR/W, and a DVD-ROM.

Since I only have the two ports, I'm going to have to master/slave the hard drives and optical drives. Any recommendations from a Sage (as well as general HTPC - DVD watching, etc.) perspective on the best way to do this?

My initial thought is IDE1 has primary/master hard drives and IDE2 has DVD-ROM master/CDRW slave.

Will I run into any problems recording to or playing from the IDE1 master hard drive? I'd like to use both drives for video/MP3 storage, although the primary on IDE1 will also have WinXP and apps installed on it.

Any advice is greatly appreciated...thanks!

Jason

[rcleav]

You have the right idea, you never want to put harddrives on the same channel as slower Optical drives.
Use IDE1 for the master and slave harddrives and IDE2 for the CD/DVD drives.
I have the SageTv program on the IDE1 master or C: drive and the video folder in a larger drive as IDE1 slave of F: drive.

Good luck

[mlbdude]

I have two SageTV video drives as master\slave. I am acutally have some slowdown issues in SageTV with them as far as writing to one and reading from the other at the same time. It has been suggested that I move one of them to the other IDE channel and share it with my CD-ROM. But I wonder what new problems that will cause when Sage is in the background recording and I am watching a movie of the CD?

[rcleav]

mlbdude If you have room for it I would think a raid setup would be the better solution. It's been pretty common knowledge that mixing a harddrive with a slower opticle drive will only slow the harddrive down. Acourse you would need a motherboard or pci card that support raid and two matching harddrives.

Good Luck!

[rotaryracer]

Yeah, I'm kinda tempted to use the onboard SATA and setup a RAID 0 array for the hard drives and dedicate each IDE port to an optical drive. Of course, SATA 160GB drives are close to double the cost of what I can get PATA 160GB drives for.

One more question (drive oriented) - should I partition the primary "boot" and app drive to a small (say 10-20GB) partition and use the remaining 150GB-ish for Sage recordings? Can I run Sage (and WinXP and other apps) from the same hard drive I'm recording to, or will I eat up too much bandwidth and hose recordings?

Thanks!

[rcleav]

That sounds reasonable to me.
I have two drives a 20gig and a 120gig.
The 20gig is split into 2 equal partitions, partition1 is WinXP partition 2 is for programs. The second larger drive is for SageTv and other storage. This works fine for me and backing up the separate smaller partitions is easier.

have fun