i was thinking about getting a 3.5 to 5.25 hdd adapter so i can put my hdd closer to my dvd drive so i can set hdd to master dvd to slave and have my cdrw on a separte ide channel. basically i want to burn direct cd's without ripping them to my hdd first. anyways my case uses 5.25 drive rails instead of the old fashioned screw it in type. could i just get any adapter or do i need a special one for drive rails?

hello i know that some ide devices like cd-rw,s and cd-r,s will run at slower rates than most hard drives and slow the hard drive down to there speed. i have a hard drive on same ide chanel as a cd-rw and only use it for back ups so have noticed no problem,never tried burning from it. i dont know what rated dvd run at.

Anything that fits will work... But they do make adapter rails that screw onto the side of the 5.25" bay so that it will accomodate a 3.5" drive.

Yes they do make an adapter for that. (I have three of them). But when you run a CD-ROM drive on the same channel as the hard drive it will slow your hard drive way down. Instead of spending $7.00 on a adapter I recomand spending $10.00 On a PCI IDE card from ebay. This will work if you have a open PCI port and a nother IDE cable.

i asked the same question to my friend and this is what he sent me: Here are the benchmarks taken with HD Tach 2.61 With slave: Random Access Time 14.6 ms Read Burst Speed: 58.8 MBps Read Speed Average: 36621.1 KBps Without Slaved DVD drive: Random Access Time: 14.6 ms Read Burst Speed: 59.3 MBps Read Speed Average: 36583.1 KBps This was taken on a 60 GB Seagate Barracuda 4 parallel ATA 7200 rpm 2 meg cache hard drive. As you can see, having a slave on it made not a bit of difference. Perhaps a very slight difference in burst speed, but it's negligible and won't be noticed. Have fun slaving. Noall