I have 2 hard drives, a writer and DVD ROM drive. Whats the best configuration for the IDE setup, performance wise? Is it better to have both hard disks on one channel and both writer and dvd rom on the other, or is it better to set each hard drive as a master and the drives as a slave? Thanks

system HD primary master dvd rom primary slave second HD secondary master cdburner secondary slave this is what worked best for me!! DO NOT put dvd and burner on same IDE!

Why not but the burner and DVD on the same IDE channel? I've done it plenty of times without any issues at all. You are going to have to find out what works best for you. I myself would do it this way. Place the fastest HDD as the primary Master and Slave the 2nd HDD off of it. Now, how you setup your DVD/BURNER on the 2nd IDE channel is up to you. If both drives are PIO Mode 4 it really doesn't matter in my opinion. I still want to know why not to hook up the DVD/BURNER together. Laters, KTTD

Id first ask what type of system you have.. What mainboard? When i build newer systems i find that puting the CDROMS on the same IDE channel works great, just set your Burner to master and DVD to slave. Make you boot drive master on the primary controller and everything slave the other drive to it. If you really want a stable machine put in an extra IDE controler and put all drives on their own Channel, although wastefull and not much better in performance it seems to be more stable..