IDE disk problem

[Jeff Vian]

On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 01:24 +0300, Kostas Sfakiotakis wrote:
> Brian Gaynor wrote:
> > On Mon, 2005-04-11 at 16:36 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>Personally, I NEVER TRUST THE "CS" SETTING!  It is totally unreliable.
> >>Jumper one drive as "MA" (ideally, the one you're using now) and the
> >>other as "SL" and you should be fine.
> > 

One persons opinion, but not true across the board.  Otherwise why would
ALL new systems and drives be delivered as CS.?
 
> > 
> > I have never personally seen problems with drives set to Cable Select on
> > a modern machine.  Many high-volume manufacturers (Dell and Compaq are
> > two I have personal experience with) have been shipping CS configured
> > machines for 6 years or more.
> 
> If the drive marked as Cable Select or "CS" is together with a drive 
> jumpered
> as Slave , then the IDE controller replaces the cable select with 
> "Master" whereas

Brian,
This is counter intuitive, and not always true. It depends upon where on
the CS cable the cs drive is attached.

> if the drive marked as Cable Select is together with another one marked 
> as Master
> then the Cable Select is considered as "Slave" . Special Care is needed 
> in case
> the Cable Select is alone . At that point am not certain that the 
> Controller can replace
> the Cable Select setting with "Single".

It does that flawlessly for me, and I have never had a problem since I
began using exclusively CS jumpering on the drive and a cable select
cable.

>  I know for certain that my 160 
> GB Western Digital
> hard disk has different jumper positions if it alone "Master w/o Slave" 
> or Master if a slave
> disk is present . By the way this very disk ( 160 GB WD ) was originally 
> shipped to me as
> Cable Select , probably because the shop didn't new  my hard disk 
> configuration and
> so it had the most "compatible" position . 

Default jumpering from all manufacturers I have used in the last 5
years, since all new systems being built use the cable select cable.

> IMO it would be preferable 
> not to use
> the Cable Select setting even when there is no ambiguity about what the 
> drive realy is .
> 

Cable select is exactly what it says, and is VERY reliable in my
experience.

-Use a cable select cable
-plug the drive to be used as master to the connection designated as
master.
-plug the drive to be used as slave to the connection designated as
slave.
-jumper both drives as cable select (CS)

With this config it does not matter if you have 2 drives or one, they
will always be seen as master or slave depending upon where they are
connected on the  cable.

Of course there are a few (VERY FEW) drives that will have problems, but
I think they are all also very old, and new drives will not have any
problems being (single/master/slave) on the cable.

Please note that most new drive cables are UDMA and cable select as
well. I can't remember when I last saw a new IDE cable that was not
UDMA.

I may also note that the only time I have ever had a problem with IDE
drives on a cable select cable has been when the user (customers of
mine) chose to jumper the drives as master/slave and they were using a
cable select cable. They got intermittent errors due to the jumpering
conflicts.  The permanent fix ---- rejumper the drive to CS.
(Really easy to fix.)


> Kind Regards,
>          Kostas
> 
>