2 Hard drives - advice needed

[chronic420]

I have 2 hard drives installed, they are both on the 1st ide cable, one is the master and one is the slave, and also a cd-r drive as the primary on the second cable. My computer seems to struggle when reading from both hard drives at the same time. Would it be faster if I put one of the hard drives on the second IDE cable as the master, with my cd-r as the slave, or should I leave it alone?

Thanks
chronic420

 

[Zepper]

Yes, it would be faster. Only one drive on an IDE channel can be accessed at a time. For the same reason, you will want to locate the CDR on the opposite channel to the HD from which it will most often be recording data. If you have a free slot, it might be worthwhile to buy a PCI IDE card (the Silicon Image based cards are inexpensive, fast and can be used for either RAID or standard IDE) so you can put each drive on its own channel for best possible overall performance.
. For some reason, add on controllers seem to perform better than on-board ones and only take one IRQ per two channels. So for three drives, you could disable your onboard primary channel to free up IRQ 14 for the add on card - put your HDs on the add on channels and the CDR on the secondary onboard channel.
.bh.
:beer: time!