This seems to always be a subject where one receives conflicting responses
recommending this or that configuration of one's IDE-connected devices.
Based upon my own experience and tests a computer facility with which I was
associated with conducted a few years ago on this very issue -- in virtually
every case, when working with modern equipment, aside from connecting one's
day-to-day booting HDD as Primary Master (a near-universal configuration it
seems), it really didn't matter performance-wise how the remaining drives
(hard drives & optical drives) were connected on the two IDE channels.
Nearly all of our tests were conducted with two hard drives and two optical
drives - a CD-ROM & a CD burner - installed.
Note I said in "virtually every case" there were no significant performance
differences regardless of the IDE device configuration., There were,
however, some rather rare situations where it *did* matter with respect to
HDD connections/configurations when two HDDs were connected in the system
and a rather extroardinary number of read/write operations between the two
HDDs was commonly (routinely) going on. This kind of activity usually
involved the encoding/decoding of extremely large video files (gigabytes in
size) so this was an issue that would involve only a extremely small
percentage of PC users.
Also, again in some very rare instances, where the process involved copying
CDs (we didn't use DVDs at the time of these tests) from one optical drive
to another optical drive, there were some instances (rare as they might be)
where the configuration of the optical drives *did* matter in terms of
performance. Strangely enough, in that situation we were unable to come up
with a hard & fast rule as to the best configuration of the optical drives.
In some cases we found better, i.e., faster, data transfer rates when both
optical drives were connected on the same IDE channel. In other cases we
found it was best to connect each on a separate IDE channel. And we could
find no correlation involving the make/model of these optical drives. It was
quite puzzling. But let me emphasize that these
were relatively rare exceptions. As I previously stated, we generally found
*no* significant performance differences regardless of how the optical
drives were connected/configured.
Let me also add that we *always* used 80-wire data cables for connections to
any IDE/ATAPI device, *never* the 40-wire kind.
But do this. Experiment for yourself. In this instance don't rely on my
advice or anyone else's advice. Try different configurations of your IDE
devices and run speed tests based on your normal day-to-day activities with
the computer, i.e., accessing programs, moving/copying files, burning CDs,
etc. See if you can determine any performance difference depending upon how
this or that device is connected and, if so, connect your devices
accordingly. It's as simple as that.
Anna
