Ok, I have 2 hard drives and 2 CD drives. I have the HD on one IDE cable, and the CD drives on the other. I wanted to put them so that the cables were set up 1 HD and 1 CD rom each so that I could do a real time CD copy and not underrun my buffer when burning. But ppl have told me that if u set a HD and a CD drive on the same IDE cable, it slows down your HD alot. Also ppl have told me that if u put 2 HDs on 2 different IDE cables, it's faster then having them on one. Oppinions, suggestions? Anything would help. Thanks.

Try different combinations. It's real easy to do.

Agreed. I run 2HD's, CD-ROM drive and CD-RW drive on two IDE cables. I have one HD and the CD-ROM drive on one IDE cable and the other HD and CD-RW on the other. I've never had any problems. And it enables faster copying, no need to wait for the data to go from CD-ROm to HD to CD-RW.

actually, it depends on your hard drives say you put an ATA100 Hard drive with an ATA33 cdrom -> the cable speed will be ata33 max, so it will slow down your hard drive A LOT if you have an old hard drive and a new hard drive, dont put them on the same cable -> you may want to get a PCI IDE card for the CD-ROMs/Old Hard drives to ensure maximal speed its not recommended that you do a realtime cd-copy, it will only take a few extra minutes to copy the image to the hard drive, and this guarantees you wont run into buffer-underruns, in part because of faster hard drive speeds

I disagree with the above post concerning “real time” CD copying. I do it all the time with my CDROM and 12X cooker and it is very slick.