Ok. I have been ripping and encoding cds using the EAC/lame 3.91 combo for about a week now. Typically, the time needed for extraction alone (i.e. no compression) for a cd is about 25 minutes. To put it another way, my Plexwriter 8/4/32 seemed to average about 2.7x. Anyway, I had my optical drive set up as a master on the second IDE cable. This morning I installed a third hard drive (which I haven't got working yet BTW). Per the instruction manual for the hard drive, I installed *it* as the master and made the optical drive the slave. Now the next two cds I've ripped have taken only 5 minutes each (or an average of 9.8X). Obviously, that's a huge difference, and I should be thrilled, but I'm wondering why that would change so dramatically all of a sudden. My bigger concern is that maybe the quality of rips is not as good, even though I haven't changed any settings. Any ideas?

I don't think you gave us quite enough information. How were your drives connected before and after? Obviously, you have another hard drive, or you wouldn't be able to be ripping. So you previously had a hard drive, the Plextor, and an optical drive. Were they hooked up with the hard drive as a single on the primary chain and the Plextor and the optical on the secondary chain? And now you've got a new hard drive, which is set as a primary, so now it's the hard drive and the Plextor on the primary chain and the new hard drive and the optical drive on the secondary? If this is the case, then the fact that the device that's on the same chain as the optical drive wasn't and isn't working properly points a finger at the optical drive. Try removing it from the situation altogether and see if things improve. You might also try changing it back to the original configuration and see if it's slow, then remove the optical drive and see if it speeds up. It might be that the optical drive is broken, horking the whole chain, or it might be disabling DMA for the whole chain, or something like that. If Mark Lord was around, he'd probably be able to give you some more information.

When two IDE devices are connected to the same cable, both devices will transfer data only as fast as the slowest device on the cable. It's a limitation of the IDE specification. So if you put a fast device and a slow device on the same cable, they will both be slow.

I'm guessing that the change in configuration moved your ripper drive onto the same IDE cable as a faster device. Does that sound like what happened?

Now, whatever is now sharing the cable with the slower device (didn't look closely at your description, was it an optical drive?) will be slowed down to that speed. Just keep an eye out for it.

I'll 2nd the suggestion of making sure DMA is enabled.

What OS is this on?

Also, when using UDMA/66 controllers and drives, make sure you use the 80-pin cable... It really does matter.

Ok, thanks for the tips you've provided. To be more specific I'll describe the exact set-up;

Before:

Win2K
Celeron 533
512 MB RAM
1st IDE Cable: Maxtor 20 GB 7200 RPM ATA 33 (master) and 30 GB Quantam Fireball 7200 RPM ATA 66 (slave)
2nd IDE Cable: Plexwriter 8/4/32 only (master)


After:

Win2K
Celeron 533
512 MB RAM
1st IDE Cable: Maxtor 20 GB 7200 RPM ATA 33 (master) and 30 GB Quantam Fireball 7200 RPM ATA 66 (slave)
2nd IDE Cable: Western Digital 80 GB 7200 RPM Ultra 100 (master) and Plexwriter 8/4/32 (slave)



And even though all my drives are different ATA speeds, I think they are all running at 33, since I'm not using any controller cards and am using an old ABit BH6 mobo.

With the first set-up, I was ripping a cd in about 25 minutes or 2.5X. With the second set-up, I am ripping a cd in about 8 minutes or 9.8X. Doesn't that seem weird? The only difference is that it's now a slave instead of a master.

Why would that make it so much faster? Again, I'm not complaining, but I'm wondering if the increased speed is comprimising the audio quality.


Should I be worried?

Since you mentioned in your original post that you haven't gotten the new HD working yet, I'm guessing one of two things:
1) BIOS has the wrong PIO mode forced on for secondary master
2) Your secondary IDE controller is bad.

With both your slow ripping and HD that doesn't work appearing as secondary master, I'd be curious to see if your WD drive works as secondary slave.

On a related note...

What does that little ~4 pin cable that runs from your CD Drive to your sound card do? Is that just to allow you to play music cd's on you computer?

-Adam

What does that little ~4 pin cable that runs from your CD Drive to your sound card do? Is that just to allow you to play music cd's on you computer?

Yes. It goes to one of the sound card's mixer inputs, and if you open up the little Sound Mixer crapplet on your task bar, you should see an option for the CD Audio volume level.

This is assuming you're talking about the same cable I'm thinking of. These days there's a lot of different cables that might come off of CD-R and DVD drives. But CD-Audio is the most common one so I assume that's what you're talking about.

Actually, I now do have the 3rd (western digital) hard drive working, as the master. The optical drive is still the slave. Let me rephrase the question, though: Should a Plexwriter 8/4/32 being ripping at 10X or 3X? Or better yet, just tell me how long it typically takes you to rip one cd.

Hi.

Actually, your PlexWriter (if it is comparable to the UltraPlex readers for the aspect of audio extraction) should really rip at 10x or even faster. With EAC and its secure ripping though, it should not exceed that by much.
The UltraPlex40 is able to rip audio at about 24x in my setup when in burst mode, and at about 11x when in EAC's safe mode.

BTW: You asked how long it takes me to rip one CD. That isn't at all a comparable measure, because some audio CDs are filled to the max (well, to about 64min) while most are only filled to 45-50minutes. That is a difference of >30%.

cu,
sven