Hi All! Check this out: I've had a Maxtor 60GB master by itself on my my primary IDE bus and 2 CDROM drives on the secondary bus. I'm doing some video editing and noticed that my HD was filling up quickly so I decided to add a slave to store the captured video. I added a Quantum Fireball Pro 60GB as the slave. Both drives use the jumper to set either master or slave instead of cable select. My video capture software, Pinnacle Studio 8, has a utility to tell you if a drive is capable of video capture. I ran the utility once on the new slave drive and it passed. The second time I ran the test, it failed! I thought it was the Pinnacle software, but then I downloaded QuickBench ( http://download.com.com/3000-2086-10106034.html?tag=lst-0-2 ) to do some benchmarking of the two drives. When I run this utility after a fresh reboot, by slave works fine the first few times I run it (30MB/s read, 30MB/s write). Then if I run it on both my master and slave at the same time, suddenly the performance of the slave drops down to 3MB/s and 3MB/s! From this point on, even if I run QuickBench on the slave by itself, it returns the same low performance! It never performs well again. Any ideas?!?!? Thanks in advance... Larry

I would put one drive and CD-ROM on one cable. This might help your performance.

Hey there Dragonman, I thought about that. I actually have a DVD player and a DVD burner. I'm concered that if I match my DVD player to my master that my DVD player will experience the same slow down. Also, I've heard back and forth on whether or not it is good to put a fast HD on the same bus with a slow CD/DVD ROM. Is that true? As a test I may take both DVD drives out of the system and put each HD on its own bus as a master. Then re-test to see if I notice any performance issues. Then I could put back each DVD one at a time to see if other issue come back. I failed to mention above that in QuickBench, it shows that my CPU usage jumps to 100% during the read/write test when my data rates drop down to about 3MB/s. It only does this for the slave drive. I'm very perplexed as to why the CPU usage would jump like that. I killed most other processes, even tried this in Safe Mode and still the same thing happened. Task manager didn't show any process hogging the CPU. What could cause this? Thanks! Larry

Insure DMA is enabled on your new hard drive.

In device manager I don't have a check box to turn on or off DMA for either hard drive. I think my MSI motherboard handles that. I've heard the some hard drives don't have this as an option in Win XP. I'm using a Maxtor 60GB HD relatively new and a Quantum FireBall Pro 60GB drive.