5 ms·

Oh yeah. IDE Master/Slave was pure voodoo. With hard drives it usually wasn't too bad, but ATAPI devices (CD-ROMs) were just insane. I saw everything from dr

Oh yeah. IDE Master/Slave was pure voodoo. With hard drives it usually wasn't too bad, but ATAPI devices (CD-ROMs) were just insane. I saw everything from drives that wouldn't be recognized unless they were slave to a HDD, to drives that refused every configuration except being a slave drive with no master--which isn't supposed to work at all. Cable select sometimes worked, but I didn't trust it as much as the jumpers. I did try to match the jumpers with the position on the cable just to give myself a better chance of success. The article is correct that mixing drive brands, or even mixing drive eras was asking for trouble. Another fun aspect is when someone wanted to install more than 4 drives and had to use one of the ISA (later PCI) PATA cards. Those cards _never_ supported ATAPI devices in my experience, so there were some machines that booted off of a HDD hanging off of an ISA card so the 4 burners could be on the system controller. And don't even get me started on the godforsaken CMD640 that every damn manufacturer used for years.

aidenn0 5y ago
By the time ATAPI was around (instead of proprietary CD-ROMs), all of my issues with 2 drives had gone away. You had to jumper them right (cable-select was always hit-or-miss for me, right up until SATA), but if you did that they worked just fine for me.
Slartie 5y ago
> so the 4 burners could be on the system controller Oh those were the days, in which poor students financed their high-end IT equipment by selling "backup copies" of popular music albums, games and other software products on the school yard to their peers...
throw0101a 5y ago
I found that, back in the day, simply buying Plextors was the simplest solution. For best results when burning, you'd want the optical drive to be the master device on the secondary IDE bus. Of course IDE only allowed two devices on a bus, with generally only two buses. If you wanted more you had to go with (parallel) SCSI, which allowed up to 8 IDs (one taken up by the controller) with the 8-bit bus, and up to 16 IDs on the 16-bit controller: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_high_byte_termination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_high_byte_termination Just don't forget to put the properly-ohmed termination at the correct location on the cable. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_SCSI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_SCSI There was folklore that said three terminations were needed to get things to work: two electrical, one on each end of the cable; and one termination of a rooster at midnight around five black candles.
- brudgers 5y ago
  I could be mistaken, but I seem to remember adding additional drives using ISA IDE controller cards.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    Which does not contradict what I said: > Of course IDE only allowed two devices on a bus, with generally only two buses. Most motherboards only had two buses, which each bus have two devices. Adding another card would allow another 2x2 drives. Adding a SCSI card would have allowed for another seven devices (later fifteen). Most folks though didn't need that many at home.
    - selimnairb 5y ago
      Also, SCSI drives were more expensive (but usually performed better), so most stuck with IDE’s limitations.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      SCSI stuff was way too expensive for poor college kids. Funnily enough ATAPI was just a slightly cut down version of SCSI run over ATA. There was little reason for the big SCSI price premium except that the vendors thought they could get more money out of businessmen and Mac users.
      - throw0101a 5y ago
        SCSI drives were faster because higher RPM devices were available. 10 kRPM and 15 kRPM (!!!) SCSI drives were a thing, but I don't think there were many (any?) IDE drives that spun that fast. WD's 10 kRPM drive made quite the splash when it was announced, IIRC: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor Whether a home user "needed" that kind of speed was quite another thing.
        brudgers 5y ago
citrin_ru 5y ago
Maybe I started to use computers too late (my 1st HDD supported UDMA/33 or 66 AFAIR), but I don’t remember any problems with master/slave. Just set jumpers and it works.
- codezero 5y ago
  Yeah, I am not doubting the author at all, but I built a lot of computers for myself and others in the 90s, and maybe I just don't remember, or maybe I always had two cables, one for each drive, but I distinctly remember setting jumpers and it just worked. That said, I was using mostly Linux, sometimes Windows, so maybe this was an OS/2 thing? Something I do remember though, was having to get the blocks, cylinders, etc... manually when partitioning/formatting disks. I guess I got lucky with the drives I used, which back then would have mostly been Western Digital with a splash of Seagate, maybe because I didn't typically mix vendors in an initial build I just didn't run into these issues.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Just a couple years earlier and it was more fraught, for sure. UMDA/33 was probably late '97 or early '98. I got a couple of oddball IDE drives from a friend back in about '94-- a 100MB-ish Xebec and a similarly-sized KALOK drive. I recall having difficult getting them working along side my Western Digital 250MB. I had a SCSI CD-ROM so I didn't have that mess to deal with and ended up running one of the oddball drives at a time on my secondary IDE channel. The fun I don't miss was "disk overlays" and finally adding a Promise-branded ISA card with an option ROM to exceed the >1,024 cylinder (504MiB) "barrier". I still have that card knocking around somewhere, I think. It'd be fun to dump that ROM and see what it looked like.
- brudgers 5y ago
  The problem I remember was reconfiguring computers. There were the jumpers and changes to BIOS. And drivers in Autoexec.bat and Config.sys for CDROM's. If I wasn't systematic and taking notes, I could spend time thrashing round in circles through reboots and partial hardware disassembly. Oh gosh, once I was upgrading a mid-tower clone with a second drive (170mb). It had a Cyrix 803087 chip that didn't seat tight in the motherboard and it would work fine on its side from gravity so I would button it up and the chip would loosen when the case was standing up and the system didn't boot and my notes didn't help and it was a production machine. Figured it out around two in the morning.
Pxtl 5y ago
Yeah, i never trusted cable select either - jumpers every time.
- accountofme 5y ago
  the worst was trying to find one when you inevitable lost a jumper....
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
Your comment brought back the nostalgia of often changing the jumper position and saving the day at friends place during computer troubles.

aidenn0 5y ago

By the time ATAPI was around (instead of proprietary CD-ROMs), all of my issues with 2 drives had gone away. You had to jumper them right (cable-select was always hit-or-miss for me, right up until SATA), but if you did that they worked just fine for me.

Slartie 5y ago

> so the 4 burners could be on the system controller Oh those were the days, in which poor students financed their high-end IT equipment by selling "backup copies" of popular music albums, games and other software products on the school yard to their peers...

throw0101a 5y ago

I found that, back in the day, simply buying Plextors was the simplest solution. For best results when burning, you'd want the optical drive to be the master device on the secondary IDE bus. Of course IDE only allowed two devices on a bus, with generally only two buses. If you wanted more you had to go with (parallel) SCSI, which allowed up to 8 IDs (one taken up by the controller) with the 8-bit bus, and up to 16 IDs on the 16-bit controller: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_high_byte_termination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_high_byte_termination Just don't forget to put the properly-ohmed termination at the correct location on the cable. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_SCSI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_SCSI There was folklore that said three terminations were needed to get things to work: two electrical, one on each end of the cable; and one termination of a rooster at midnight around five black candles.

brudgers 5y ago
I could be mistaken, but I seem to remember adding additional drives using ISA IDE controller cards.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  Which does not contradict what I said: > Of course IDE only allowed two devices on a bus, with generally only two buses. Most motherboards only had two buses, which each bus have two devices. Adding another card would allow another 2x2 drives. Adding a SCSI card would have allowed for another seven devices (later fifteen). Most folks though didn't need that many at home.
  - selimnairb 5y ago
    Also, SCSI drives were more expensive (but usually performed better), so most stuck with IDE’s limitations.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    SCSI stuff was way too expensive for poor college kids. Funnily enough ATAPI was just a slightly cut down version of SCSI run over ATA. There was little reason for the big SCSI price premium except that the vendors thought they could get more money out of businessmen and Mac users.
    - throw0101a 5y ago
      SCSI drives were faster because higher RPM devices were available. 10 kRPM and 15 kRPM (!!!) SCSI drives were a thing, but I don't think there were many (any?) IDE drives that spun that fast. WD's 10 kRPM drive made quite the splash when it was announced, IIRC: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital_Raptor Whether a home user "needed" that kind of speed was quite another thing.
      - brudgers 5y ago

citrin_ru 5y ago

Maybe I started to use computers too late (my 1st HDD supported UDMA/33 or 66 AFAIR), but I don’t remember any problems with master/slave. Just set jumpers and it works.

codezero 5y ago
Yeah, I am not doubting the author at all, but I built a lot of computers for myself and others in the 90s, and maybe I just don't remember, or maybe I always had two cables, one for each drive, but I distinctly remember setting jumpers and it just worked. That said, I was using mostly Linux, sometimes Windows, so maybe this was an OS/2 thing? Something I do remember though, was having to get the blocks, cylinders, etc... manually when partitioning/formatting disks. I guess I got lucky with the drives I used, which back then would have mostly been Western Digital with a splash of Seagate, maybe because I didn't typically mix vendors in an initial build I just didn't run into these issues.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
Just a couple years earlier and it was more fraught, for sure. UMDA/33 was probably late '97 or early '98. I got a couple of oddball IDE drives from a friend back in about '94-- a 100MB-ish Xebec and a similarly-sized KALOK drive. I recall having difficult getting them working along side my Western Digital 250MB. I had a SCSI CD-ROM so I didn't have that mess to deal with and ended up running one of the oddball drives at a time on my secondary IDE channel. The fun I don't miss was "disk overlays" and finally adding a Promise-branded ISA card with an option ROM to exceed the >1,024 cylinder (504MiB) "barrier". I still have that card knocking around somewhere, I think. It'd be fun to dump that ROM and see what it looked like.
brudgers 5y ago
The problem I remember was reconfiguring computers. There were the jumpers and changes to BIOS. And drivers in Autoexec.bat and Config.sys for CDROM's. If I wasn't systematic and taking notes, I could spend time thrashing round in circles through reboots and partial hardware disassembly. Oh gosh, once I was upgrading a mid-tower clone with a second drive (170mb). It had a Cyrix 803087 chip that didn't seat tight in the motherboard and it would work fine on its side from gravity so I would button it up and the chip would loosen when the case was standing up and the system didn't boot and my notes didn't help and it was a production machine. Figured it out around two in the morning.

Pxtl 5y ago

Yeah, i never trusted cable select either - jumpers every time.

accountofme 5y ago
the worst was trying to find one when you inevitable lost a jumper....

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

Your comment brought back the nostalgia of often changing the jumper position and saving the day at friends place during computer troubles.