Did you know "single" Hard Drive Booted Faster?

**grandamp3** · 07-12-2004, 10:11 AM

My hard drive is a Western Digital and on it, it has 10 pins (5 sets of 2 across). For Master, you are suppose to jumper the two pins in the middle, we'll call them 5&6. For Slave you jumper the ones next to it, 3&4. But for Single, you jumper 4&6.

http://support.wdc.com/techinfo/general/jumpers.asp
^^^^^Mine is a 10 pin configuration

I believe though that Single is different than Master, its Different obvious than slave, and as well is different to Cable Select. Again, i think someone mentoined that only certain hard drives had it as an option, but if you have a western digital (all of my WDs have it) then you should have it as an option and would recommend testing with it.

PS This is all done with my hard drive being told what it is in the BIOS (auto-detect once) and my other primary & slaves being told "Not Installed".

**DarquePervert** · 07-12-2004, 10:26 AM

The drives that have the setting for a SINGLE drive basically close the loop on whichever wires are used to detect the drive's setting.
This will speed up boot times. Also, if you have a drive set to SINGLE and have another HDD ont he same cable behind it, it won't be detected.
Been burned by this before.

Another way to speed up boot times is to set your IDE channels that have no drives on them to NONE in your BIOS setup. If the BIOS is set to NONE it's not even going to look for a drive on that channel.
Turning off FDD seek & FDD swap and enabling the QUICK POST options will also speed up boot times as well.

**turbochris** · 07-12-2004, 11:11 AM

anyone try setting the unused channels to NONE in the device manager in 2K or XP?

**Plinkey** · 07-12-2004, 09:01 PM

Originally Posted by Enforcer

Not all brands have the 'single' option

I know that on some drives, like WD, come in the 'single' config, if the drive doesn't say it, its usually with no jumper, or you can just put the jumper horizontally across random pins....this is handy if you have a single drive and set it to master, and the bios wont recognize it.

It also may speed boot times to disable the ide channels that you dont use in the bios.

-Plinkey

**Gruneun** · 07-13-2004, 01:24 PM

Originally Posted by dominic

sounds interesting.....

one question, how do you set your hard drive to single drive? all the ones i have ever seen have 3 jumper settings, Master (M), Slave (S), and Cable Select (CS)?

do you just mean cable select, or no jumpers at all??

On the drive itself, the jumpers for Master and Single are usually the same. He means changing a BIOS setting that tells the motherboard not to look for another drive. Otherwise, the BIOS quickly finds the drive and spends additional time polling for a possible second drive. By explicitly telling it not to look for a second drive, that time isn't wasted.

**turbochris** · 07-13-2004, 03:47 PM

some old CD drives had master, slave, cable select, and single. 4 choices. WD is no jumper for single. most maxtors don't have a single setting.

**acetaminophen** · 09-03-2004, 01:35 PM

if it is set to master it means that there is also a slave so it looks for it. If there is one in a few seconds it will continue booting up. If there is none it gets hung for a few seconds extra looking for it. Setting it to single makes it so that it knows there is only one hard drive.

**Jeremyvnc** · 09-03-2004, 01:50 PM

Originally Posted by acetaminophen

if it is set to master it means that there is also a slave so it looks for it. If there is one in a few seconds it will continue booting up. If there is none it gets hung for a few seconds extra looking for it. Setting it to single makes it so that it knows there is only one hard drive.

Exactly and cable select selects the drive that is last on the ide (EIDE) cable as the master and the other(s) as slaves of it. If your driver doesn't have a "single" setting, set it to cable select and you should get faster boot up times. Reason for that is that the computer has already searched the entire cable and knows the location of the drives when it finds the master. I usually set my drives to cable select unless I can manually configure the drive specs (heads, sects, ect) in the bios (at which time I make them master and slave).

[edit]Just rememebered that to be able to use the cable select feature your IDE, EIDE, or UltraIDE must support the cable select feature.[/edit]