what is slave?

what is a slave drive? everyone on here talk about em, but i have no clue what they are, are they like a hard drive? ( hard drive is where you put da cd you have at rite? "hope im not that dumb lol )

 

Any device that is controlled by another device, called the master.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/slave.html

Another way of thinking about it would be Primary and Secondary drives. A good example would be if you have two Hard Drives or CD Drives in your PC using the same IDE cable one must be the Primary (or Master Drive) while the other must be the Secondary (or Slave Drive).

Hope that helps.

 

out of curiousty did you do any research prior to posting all your questions here? anyway a slave harddrive is a slave that has been wired behind another hard drive, it is not used to boot the software so it is called the slave becuase all it does is take orders from the primary. and no your cds go into your cd-rom drive. hardrives are hidden away in the depths of your computer. which i would recommend staying away from for a while until you learn some more.

eric

 

lol, the hard drive is where you save stuff on. it stores every last bit of info. when you rip a cd or somethin, ur basically copyin it from your cd to the hard drive(which is like a bunch of cd's packed in a case).

and now for explaining slave and primary drives. lets say you have two hard drives, one has to be primary and one has to be slave, you load windows onto the primary because its the one that gets booted up when you turn your computer on. instead of thinkin of it as primary and SLAVE, think of it as primary and SECONDARY, i think most people would understand that a lil better.

if anybody else wants to add somethin, feel free. or if you can explain it better then me, then go right ahead.

eric and jackson posted at same time, lol.

 

I has to do with IDE channels and how IDE hard drives work.

Back in the day (way, way back when a kilobyte was a lot of data and nobody would ever need more that 640K of RAM) a hard disk drive had to have either a special control card to be able to access the data on it. The BIOS doesn't know commands to make the drive head move, for example. But you'd need a controller card for every drive, and each controller card would be useful for just that drive. What IDE did was take the controller card and move it as part of the drive -- hence Integrated Drive Electronics -- so you could simply plug the drive into the motherboard like we do today. If you look at the bottom of a hard drive, you'll see the green PCB circuit board that makes up the hard drive controller.

Each IDE channel can have up to two devices attached to it. But each channel can only have one controller. The drive whose controller is active is called the "master". The other drive obeys the commands of the master's controller rather than it's own. That's the "slave". A single drive is, of course, the master and there is no slave.

If you have two drives with different speeds on the same channel, say an ATA33 and an ATA100, then the ATA100 should be the master, since that's the faster interface and it's got to do all the data moving.

CD drives are a bit weird. They'll happily operate as a slave with no master, and will often (IIRC) not operate as masters to a slaved hard drive. Not that you'd want to do that, because hard drives tend to have faster interfaces that CD drives.

 

In this case, aren't your hard drives only going to be working as fast as the slowest drive? I always thought that it was inherently better to use the same speed when using multiple drives. Just working from a general rule of thumb that the overall system's performance will be hampered by it's lowest denominators. I agree the ATA100 should be the master in this case, but if that was my only option I'd only have that ATA33 installed long enough to back it up

 

I've actually never heard a clear answer on that. I know for a long time the recommendation was to separate the CD drive from the HD because of this issue, but I've also read that it's a myth or that it's not true for slaved hard drive. I've never tested it myself as fas as benchmarking.

Intel Application Accellerator on my i810 mobo says that my Maxtor drive (master) is currently at UDMA-5 (ATA-100) while the Plextor 12/10/32A (slave) is at DMA MW-2 (multiword DMA; ATA-16). Everest agrees.

I do know that if you hook up an ATA66 or higher drive with a 40 conductor IDE cable that it operates as ATA33.

 

is the hard drive where you put your memory at? like in my laptop it had 40 gigs, thats what it is or what? and a slave drive... still lost about it, can you see it on the outside on your comp like you CD drive? like is it below your CD drive? or what? confused

 

A hard drive is considered a storage device. RAM, or memory, is like the workspace that programs run in. Although the sizes of both are expressed in megabytes-- or in the case of today's hard drives, gigabytes-- they serve different functions in your computer. Since, in most computers, more than one hard drive are connected to the same ribbon cable, the computer need to know which one is which in some way, and that is accomplished by setting jumpers on the drives to specific positions. The main drive-- and always the one that has your operating system on it-- is termed the "master" of the two drives, and the second is termed the "slave". It's little more than a naming convention, really. A CD drive attached to the same cable as a hard drive or other CD would also have to have its jumpers set appropriately-- in any case, two drives of any type attached with the same cable to the motherboard have to be set with one as master and the other as slave.

X_40's_X, when you go get your router and wireless PC card kit, see if they have one of those books on PCs for folks that don't know alot about them yet. It will help you understand a lot of all this more quickly, and keep us from writing a whole book here in the forums.

 

There is a Master and a Slave Drive(s).
Master is istalled in your comp(if you bought it), and the Slave, is an extra HDD you want to add for optimal performance and more space, of course.
I just bought a Slave Drive for 120GB, works great.

 

Your system's hard drive(s) are not likely to be visible from the outside. In nearly all systems built currently, they are concealed within the system case. A laptop hard drive may also be physically much smaller than a CD-ROM drive even though it holds far more data.

Unlike a CD-ROM drive or floppy drive, there is no need to access a hard drive physically. IBM used to call a hard drive a "fixed drive" because the disks on which the data is written are not removeable.

A hard drive is packaged in its own sealed case; opening that case for any reason will void the hard drive's warranty and will shorten the life of the drive by several orders of magnitude.

 

addy thx for tha place, ill look there, and sorry for all da questions doug

 

Err, yeah, read the rest of the thread.

Master and slave is just a setting on a drive. i.e. a hard drive is a hard drive, and it has a jumper on the back to tell it whether its being a master or a slave. And a hdd that is installed in your computer, as in, intergrated on the motherboard because thats just daft. Yes, most manufacturers will include one HDD as part of the setup, which will be a master on the primary IDE channel.

If you're talking about an external drive, they are treated totally differently as they dont run on an IDE Channel, they run on paralell (eugh, slowness!) USB, or firewire, or even Ethernet, and thus they don't have the Master/slave setting which is part of the IDE standard, because they simply dont need it.