Install drives (optical & disks) on 100/66 or 133/100/66 IDE connectors?

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I need help with how to connect my dvd-write optical drive and my two hard drives...

Take a look at this Asus P5GD1 motherboard:
http://www.gamepc.com/images/labs/rev-p5gd1-boardLG.jpg

There are three 40-1 pin connectors on this board:

[*]1) Bottom-right: PRI_IDE (black)
[*]2) Bottom-left: PRI_RAID (red, vertical)
[*]3) Bottom-left: SEC_RAID (red, horizontal)

The asus manual says the single, black PRI_IDE is for...

an Ultra DMA 100/66 signal cable. The Ultra DMA 100/66 signal cable has three connectors: a blue connector for the primary IDE connector on the motherboard, a black connector for an Ultra DMA 100/66 IDE slave device (optical drive/hard disk drive), and a gray connector for an Ultra DMA 100/66 IDE master device (hard disk drive).

The manual says the dual, red RAID connectors are for...

Ultra ATA 133/100/66 signal cables. These connectors support up to four IDE hard disk drives that can be configured as a disk array through the onboard IDE RAID controller. These connectors are set to IDE mode by default. In IDE mode, you can connect IDE devices to these connectors such as boot/data hard disk drives or optical drives.

I have three drives:

[*]1) NEC 3500-AG (dvd writer)
[*]2) IBM Deskstar 120GXP (IC35L120AVVA07-0) (product specs)
[*]3) Maxtor 250GB DiamondMax 9

I'm pretty sure I connect the Maxtor to one of the red 133/100/66 connectors, but I'm not sure about where to connect the NEC 3500 or the old IBM deskstar. The deskstar is years old and still running in perfect condition, but the product specs make no mention of ATA 133/100 speeds, so I don't know if it's better to connect it to the single, black 100/66 connector.

Please advise on the appropriate configuration for all three devices.

Thanks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Personally, if your mobo has both "IDE" and "IDE RAID" connectors, I would keep all of the opticals on the regular "IDE" ports, and then put the HDs on the "IDE RAID" ports. Hopefully, the RAID BIOS will allow you to run the drive as single drives, by defining them as single-drive arrays. (Or as just plain single drives.)

Edit: Don't worry about the ATA-100/133 thing, they are backwards-compatible, and there is no real performance difference between 100 and 133 with today's drives. By the time that drives are mechanically fast enough to go past that limit, we'll all be using SATA by then. The biggest question is whether or not the IDE ports support ATAPI devices (optical drives). By your description, the IDE RAID chipset used will, but a general rule-of-thumb is to keep HDs on the RAID ports, and opticals on the mobo's standard IDE ports.

 

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Ok, I'll put the DVD writer on the 100/66 IDE connector. That leaves two RAID IDE connectors. Should I put each hard drive on it's own connector (master & master), or place both drives on the same connector (master & slave), or does it not make a difference.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you put the two HDs on seperate channels, it could theoretically improve performance slightly, when doing disk-to-disk file copies. The only (minor) downside to doing that, is having to fit two IDE cables in your case instead of one. I don't notice all that much difference myself, I have three HDs connected to a Promise Ultra100 TX2, two on the Primary, and one on the Secondary IDE port. If I'm doing heavy disk I/O (paging activity to the first physical drive), file copies between the two other HDs slow down slightly, but that may have as much to do with the lack of available RAM at the time to use for disk-caching as much as anything else.