Dual Hard Drives Question

[yabanci]

I'm putting together a new system with a nforce2 motherboard (epox 8rda+) and a 80gb maxtor 7200 ata/133 hd (already have it). I also have a 40gb maxtor 7200 ata/66 from my old computer that I want to put into the new one for backup/storage. Then I have cd-rw to go in the system.

My question is, how do I set this up? I've heard conflicting statements about using an ata/133 as a master and ata/66 as a slave, some saying it's fine and both will work at their capacities and some say the two drives will default to the slower ata/66.

the epox board has two ide channels, do I put the two hd's on one and the cd-rw on the other, or the faster hd on one and the slower hd and cd on the other? Can somebody please straighten this out for me? muchas gracias.

 

[hjo3]

IDE channel 1: 80 GB HD as master.
IDE channel 2: 40 GB HD as master, CD-RW as slave.

This'll be most efficient (IMHO) since the only time you'll have decreased performance on the 40 GB used for storage is when the CD-RW is in heavy use. Even then, the performance drop of the HD won't be that much.

 

[yabanci]

okay, good to hear, because I have an external firewire hp dvd burner, so I rarely if ever use the cd-rw anyway. Thanks.

 

[hjo3]

 

[Alkali]

Yep, thats the best setup.

 

[aka1nas]

Even if that setup reduces your performance a little bit while burning, you won't feel it as your OS is on another drive on another channel.