hello,
i hope it's obvious and well known problem. But i've got very frustrated.
I have SATA, 2 IDE controllers.
I have SATA drive - master.
2 HD drives ( ide ) connected on each of the controllers - they got recognized by RAID BIOS immediately upon boot, And DVDRW as slave on ide as well.
now the problem is that if i'm writing to dvd i can't r/w to/from ide that is on the same controller. Makes me mad and pissed
Please advise.

oh, it's ASpire ast160 with fedora5.
Thank you.

How can a SATA drive be master? master vs. slave applies to PATA disks, not SATA...

Is DMA set for the the optical drive or DVD drive? If not, it will help to set it to DMA. Though if both IDE drives have the same jumper setting, you are going to have some problems. One drive have to be set as Master and other have to be set as Slave. Check the manual and the color of the connectors of the ribbon IDE cable to make sure the settings are correct. Some motherboard manufactures may provide an IDE cable that is for cable select setups, so one drive have to be set as cable select and other as master. A cable select IDE cable has a wire notched out. A cable select IDE cable be fixed, so it is a regular IDE cable. A hammer, flat head screwdriver, and scrap small piece of wood all is needed to move the connector that has a wire notched out down below the notch.

FYI, SATA drives does not have any master and slave settings. SATA controllers provides independent connection for each hard drive. The SATA BIOS depends what drive is first and what drive is last even though it might be numbered wrong on the controller.

yes, yes. Sorry guys you are right, obviously about master and SATA.
I appreciate that you replied.

Are you saying that ide_controller 1 drive should be master and ide controller 2 disk has to be slave? Or master/slave in relation to the same controller?

I'm going to bring into the picture yet another optical drive - cdrw.
so whole configuration will be
IDE:
controller 1 - ide drive 11, cdrw
controller 2 - ide drive 12, dvdrw
SATA - single ( for now ) drive.

hdparm -I /dev/hda

/dev/hda:

ATAPI CD-ROM, with removable media
Model Number: _NEC DVD_RW ND-3550A
Serial Number:
Firmware Revision: 1.05
Standards:
Likely used CD-ROM ATAPI-1
Configuration:
DRQ response: 3ms.
Packet size: 12 bytes
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(cannot be disabled)
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns

/dev/hdc:

ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD1600JB-00DUA3
Serial Number: WD-WMACK2085244
Firmware Revision: 75.13B75
Standards:
Supported: 6 5 4 3
Likely used: 6
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 65535
heads 16 1
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 4128705
LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 312581808
device size with M = 1024*1024: 152627 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 160041 MBytes (160 GB)
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
bytes avail on r/w long: 74 Queue depth: 1
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 16
Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 *udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* READ BUFFER cmd
* WRITE BUFFER cmd
* Host Protected Area feature set
* Look-ahead
* Write cache
* Power Management feature set
Security Mode feature set
* SMART feature set
* FLUSH CACHE EXT command
* Mandatory FLUSH CACHE command
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* 48-bit Address feature set
Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
SET MAX security extension
* DOWNLOAD MICROCODE cmd
* SMART self-test
* SMART error logging
Security:
supported
not enabled
not locked
not frozen
not expired: security count
not supported: enhanced erase
HW reset results:
CBLID- above Vih
Device num = 0 determined by the jumper
Checksum: correct

/dev/hdb:

ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD2500JB-00GVC0
Serial Number: WD-WCAL76565830
Firmware Revision: 08.02D08
Standards:
Supported: 6 5 4 3
Likely used: 6
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 65535
heads 16 1
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 4128705
LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 488397168
device size with M = 1024*1024: 238475 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 250059 MBytes (250 GB)
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
bytes avail on r/w long: 74 Queue depth: 1
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 16
Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* READ BUFFER cmd
* WRITE BUFFER cmd
* Host Protected Area feature set
* Look-ahead
* Write cache
* Power Management feature set
Security Mode feature set
* SMART feature set
* FLUSH CACHE EXT command
* Mandatory FLUSH CACHE command
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* 48-bit Address feature set
Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
SET MAX security extension
* SET FEATURES subcommand required to spinup after power up
Power-Up In Standby feature set
* DOWNLOAD MICROCODE cmd
* SMART self-test
* SMART error logging
Security:
Master password revision code = 65534
supported
not enabled
not locked
not frozen
not expired: security count
not supported: enhanced erase
HW reset results:
CBLID- above Vih
Device num = 1 determined by the jumper
Checksum: correct

Not sure where to see if DMA enabled or not. both IDE drives are in LVM

Please let me know.
thank you

Usually IDE optical drives should be slave. Try backing up the data on the IDE hard drives and then reconnect them as master. The DVD drive should only penalize the hard drive when the DVD drive is being used like reading and writing, but it should not stall it from reading or writing to the hard drive.

hda = Primary Master
hdb = Primary Slave
hdc = Secondary Master
hdd = Secondary Slave

For higher performance, use 80 wire/40 pin IDE cable instead of the normal 40 wire/40 pin IDE cable. Though not all optical drives are ok with this.

If you are using two optical drives, connect them on the same cable instead on a different cable. The two hard drives will react better.

If nothing fixes it, update the BIOS. If you have the latest BIOS, than upgrade your computer. I suggest building your own computer because desktop computer manufactures have strange configuration and do not provide any BIOS updates that may fix a problem.

thank you for clarification.
I was under assumption that if i want to have a max throughput from the I/O subsystem then i should use 2 ( all ) controllers since i have a striped logical disk.
But you are saying that to improve the perf on the optical drives i have to isolate them.
I thinki have more general question :
Why this locking/hanging = perf. degradations is happening in the first place?

all right. did some reading and talked to my friend who works for EMC. WEll. latest approach answered a lot of my questions

Thank you all.