On 2/11/06, Claude Jones <claude_jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > We had this same conversation some months back, with pretty much the same > staunch positions being advocated. I build lots of machines, that's part of Hmmm... I didn't participate in the previous thread, so I didn't voice my staunch position there: Never EVER install a drive as a slave, unless you absolutely must do so due to the way the hardware is constructed. That last clause means something like an older iMac, where there is only room for one wacko 4" IDE cable that both your hard drive and optical drive must connect to, only one IDE connector on the motherboard, and no PCI slots for adding another IDE controller. Slaves are just too much trouble. Even when they seem to work, you can have silent data corruption that you don't notice until it's too late. (Last year I made the mistake of installing 2 brands of hard drive on 1 cable, one UATA/100 and one UATA/133. I lost 50GB of data before I figured out where the corruption was coming from.) Of course, once you apply this to a server with many drives, the IDE cables become a cooling problem. The best fix for this problem is SATA, although rounded cables also help. -- -Barry K. Nathan <barryn@xxxxxxxxx>
