ATA hard drives, also known as IDE, operate in one of three modes:
- Single Drive
- Master
- Slave
If you have one drive in your computer, it should be configured as a Single Drive.
If you have two drives on an ATA drive controller, one should be configured as the Master and the other should be configured as a Slave.
Modern computers will often have multiple ATA controllers, so you could run several drives as Master drives.
In fact, running each drive on a seperate controller can serve to improve storage performance and is highly recommended.
Most ATA drives use jumpers to configure whether they are Single Drives, Masters, or Slaves.
Cable Select
It turned out that jumpers were just a bit too confusing for the mass market. The answer was Cable Select. Cable Select is actually the way that many pre-ATA hard drive standards operated.
With Cable Select, the hard drive which you plug into the end of the drive cable become the master drive and the hard drive which you plug into the center connector on the drive cable become the slave drive.
Of course, you still have to ensure that the jumpers on the drive are configured to support Cable Select!
Here's a graphic from Seagate which shows how Cable Select works:
- The blue connector is for your motherboard or drive controller.
- The black connector at the other end is for your master drive.
- The gray connector is for the optional slave hard drive.
You will know if your drive cable supports Cable Select by looking for these colorings.
Linear Mode
