Two Hard Drives & Cache Issue

webgeeze · Rated PG Joined: 23 Nov 2005 Posts: 1 Location: Surrey

Hi

I'm looking for advise from the techies amongst you, please Wave

I am running a Rimage 2000i robotic CD duplicator and printer unit which requires a certain spec PC.

We have noticed recently, a problem where audio discs copied via the system incur an interferrence problem or crackle. We have investigated the drives concerned (plextor pro) and they seem to be fine.

The manufacturer reckons, we need a PC running two Hard Drives. They commented as follows;

"It doesnâ€™t need mirroring, it will just use the second hard disk for caching"

My question is this. If a second drive is added as a slave to the first, is the cache handled automatically by the host PC or is it something which needs configuring?

Out of interest, what is the technical effect/benefit in respect of cache, by running two drives in one PC?

thankyou in advance of any input you can provide.

justin

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:44:32 Post Subject:

Hi webgeeze, and welcome!

I am unfamiliar with your program, but in general there should be a setting to tell it where to go for cache, temporary disk space, or whatever it might call it. Some programs will look to see what disk it thinks it should use, but it doesn't always pick the one you want (I have a TV tuner/capturer like that).

Having a second disk will help the performance of the system, and may eliminate the crackling by allowing the disks to keep up with the burning. With one disk the operating system, the burning application, temporary cache data, and whatever else may be running are all trying to access the one disk and they have to wait their turn. With two disks, preferably on separate drive channels, some of the tasks can be distributed and makes things run smoother. If you have two disks on one drive channel the benefits aren't as great since the controller is trying to access both drives on one cable, which is also a limiting factor.

Are these IDE drives? SATA generally has one drive per channel, so that eliminates that concern.

BeerCheeze · Posted: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:47:44 Post Subject:

I'm not sure what they mean by "caching". There could be several possible things they are thinking.

1) Pagefile - They might be talking about moving you system pagefile from the main HDD to the 2nd HDD. This generally improves performance because you don't have 1 HDD doing all the application, OS, and pagefile work.

2) Application caching - They may want you to set up your duplication application so that it caches the data to be duped to a second drive. So like with the pagefile you have another HDD doing the work.

Both of these are good things to do, however if you are running IDE drives it will make little difference unless you can put them both on separate IDE interfaces. Running master/slave with IDE HDD's will not give you much, if any, performance increase.