I have been switching cables trying to keep my HDDs and DVDs off the same channel to deal with a slow dvd burn problem. I have a P965-DQ6 mobo with 6 sata ports. I put the primary boot drive in sataII0, 2nd hdd in sataII1 (the sata connections have 2 slots in each). dvd1 in sataII2 and dvd2 in statII4(two different pairs of sata slots). I wind up with:
primary hdd - ch 0 master
dvd1 - ch 0 slave !!!
#2 hdd - ch 1 master
dvd2 - ch 3 master
Is there a way to determine which channel one is hooking up a drive to. a dvd drive previously hooked up to sataII4 showed as ch1 slave! now same slots shows as ch3 master.

I thought putting 2 hdds in the same pair of sata connectors (sataII0 and sataII1) would have them on the same channel.

SATA - Serial ATA. this means each connector is a master. Below is an excerpt from the linked site.
http://www.serialata.org/docs/seria...

Serial ATA – Point to Point Connections for Dedicated Bandwidth
Serial ATA uses a point-to-point connection topology, meaning that each source is connected to one destination. Each
channel has the capability to work independently so that there is no contention between drives and thus no sharing of
interface bandwidth. This connection strategy also negates the need for master/slave jumper settings on devices.

I did a little research and it looks like there is a bios option to make SATA ports act like IDE. If there is an option in the bios that says 'Combined' or 'Enhanced' that might be the answer.

The way I read it:
'Combined means treat SATA drives as IDE drives.
'Enhanced' seems to mean treat them as SATA.

Maybe someone else has experience with this.

Len, when you have the slow record, is that between the chnl 0 master (C:) and chnl 0 slave (DVD 1)?

If so, you could try swapping the DVD drives.

If you read the entire article I linked to you will be surprised at the things that can affect SATA. The cables are unshielded so you need to keep them away from other cables. Don't bend tightly. That one is a kicker because any SATA cable I have ever gotten is folded up tightly. I went to a semenar on Coaxial cable once and found out kinking that cable can significantly diminish the bandwidth. Maybe the same is true for SATA. Some of these items could explain why some here are having slow burns when using SATA optical drives.

That one sure is a kicker. To keep things neat in the box I folded and tied the cables since they were so long.

And with 4hdds and 2 dvds how do you keep cables away from each other.

Round IDE cables are the same deal. I am still using SHIELDED round IDE cables because I read he same thing about IDE.