I have a 40 gig hard drive on my computer. I am trying to install an addtional hard drive so I can store my music on it. The hard drive is a Seagate st31276a 1gig. Not alot of space, but I am pretty selective music taste so it should hold enough for now. Obviously my 40gig hard drive is set to master. I have my cd-rom powered from the same ata cable. I think the cd-rom is set to cable select. When I add the addtional hard drive can I use a new ata cable and run from the ide2 slot to the hard drive? Or do I need to unhook the cable from the cd-rom and hook up to the addtional hard drive, and run the new ata cable from ide2 to the cd-rom. Hope this makes sense, and that I used the right terms. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!! Joel

Yup, just hook the drive up to the second IDE controller. Make sure that the drive is recognized in the Bios.

You might want to try putting your Master and Slave HD on one cable, and the CDROM on a different cable and see if that speeds up your system. The general rule of thumb is to have your HDs on IDE#1, and all your ROMS on IDE#2. Sometimes mixing them can slow your system considerably.

"Sometimes mixing them can slow your system considerably." It's a falsehood that a slow device on the same channel as a hard drive will slow down the hard drive. Putting the hard drives on separete controllers will very significantly speed up drive to drive transfers.

A 1GB harddrive in a modern pc with a 40 GB HDD will slow down the system anyways. No matter what IDE-port you use. My opinion, only risk it when the second HDD is at least 10GB or bigger, or you'll won't have any benefit, more likely the contrary...