Installing new HD's - Which IDE Channel should I put them on?

[thatsright]

Setting up a new PC Today and I've been reading around a few on-line guides to setting up a PC. I hear on one site to install both Hard Drives on the same IDE channel, as a Master & Slave. Another site recommends putting one drive on your Primary, and the other on your secondary as this would presumably increase efficiency when using the drives or file transfers between the two. But what about having my HD's all on one IDE channel, as I do now or is this less efficient than on separate channels? My new ABIT IC7 has integrated ATA100 controllers.

Also, with my new PC setup, I will be installing a DVD-ROM drive and CD-RW. In the Install guide for CD-RW, it recommends that the drive should be set to master, to enable max write performance when burning CD's. Then I guess I would set the DVD-Rom Drive to slave on the same IDE Secondary Channel. Does this sound like the best way?


BTW- My HD's Are Master=WD 120G with 8Mb cache & Slave=Maxtor 60gig with 2mb cache.

If you can help me out with these two topics, Thanks a million

 

[Dallascisco]

With you're setup I would put the 2 hd's on the primary ide channel with the maxtor as the master. On the secondary channel I would put the burner master and dvd slave.

You NEVER want to put a hd and cd-rom on the same ide channel, your performance will suffer.

 

[ChefJoe]

Originally posted by: Dallascisco
With you're setup I would put the 2 hd's on the primary ide channel with the maxtor as the master. On the secondary channel I would put the burner master and dvd slave.

You NEVER want to put a hd and cd-rom on the same ide channel, your performance will suffer.

If talking about 440BX and older chipsets, maybe, but independent device timing is supported on most intel chipsets newer than the 400BX and the performance suffers only when both drives on the same channel are being accessed.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confTiming-c.html