at the moment, i have the following: Primary master: HDD Primary slave: Secondary master: CDRW Secondary slave: DVD-ROM i know that if you have 2 drives on the same cable it takes longer to copy from one to the other, as the data has to go from one drive to the mobo, then back to the other drive, whereas if they are on different channels it can do this simultaneously. I hardly ever copy a cd, but once when i copied on the fly (writing at 16X), it crashed, and half the cd becam unreadable. im sure this is to do with both drives being on the same IDE. so my question is, have i got the best layout of drives do you think? i would have thought that putting the CDRW on with the HDD would make it slow in installing stuff. ps, the Primary cable is 80 pin, the secondary is 40

Well..the current setting is the best since you don't have any extra slot. You could buy a ATA card for two more IDE slots. I never copy on the fly since i want my data at thier best. Always write down to hd first. Hooking an DVD or CD with HD would slow the the HD to the speed of CD,DVD and sometimes they just won't work.

"Hooking an DVD or CD with HD would slow the the HD to the speed of CD,DVD" Not true. A cd/dvd drive that operates at 52X max will not slow down a HDD spinning at 7200. On an 80 wire cable the data has double the channels to allow the HDD to operate without interference from any other device on the same cable. other posts indicate a "Better" setup would be to have the DVD drive as primary slave to the HDD on IDE1 and the CD-RW as secondary master. the theory being that copying from either DVD or HDD to CD-RW will not be impeded by being on the same IDE channel. I never copy on the fly anyway so am indifferent to the permutations of my system. Leave yours as is unless you want to copy on the fly. or change it as takes your fancy.

yeh, thats what i thought. i hardly ever copy cds, and when i do i do it to the HDD first. thanks ;)

I have my system set up exactly the same as you have yours w/ the CD-RW as the secondary master and my DVD-ROM as secondary slave. Iam always making copies of CD's with this set up and I dont find it taking very long to record a copy. I never really timed it to see just how long it takes ? Iam not that obsessed with speed when carrying out this kind of task .The only time I like things to move really fast is when surfing the net, I hate waiting a long time for a web page to load !

Follow Richard59's advice...put the DVD drive as the primary slave. NAN, I suggest you do some research...you're giving bad advice. The days of one device slowing another when attached to the same IDE cable/channel ended a LONG time ago when "independent timing" was introduced. And that was back in the early days of the Pentium 1

Although the above advice is fine, I would prefer to see the DVDrom connected as the slave on the primary. The other two drives on the secondary channel. You are likely to be tranferring data from the boot drive to the CDRW whenever you burn. If you listen to music CDs and that seem s to impact the system performance, use the CDRW for that. Some systems will be problematic with an optical drive as master. If this happens simply switch the secondary drives. The original determining factor would be how the drive bays are setup and how you can connect the IDE cable.