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I just purchased a 2nd internal DVD burner so that I can create copies of non-copycode protected DVDs by recording directly from one drive to the other, thus avoiding the time-consuming interim step of creating an image file on my hard disk drive. My system has grown to include a number of IDE and ATAPI devices, which led me to install a Promise Ultra100TX2 controller card. Currently the card has one free port. My options are as follows: 1. Install the second burner as a slave device on the same channel as the other DVD burner, which is currently attached to the motherboard's secondary IDE controller, or 2. Install the second burner on the unused port on the Promise controller card. I'm interested in knowing which hookup should (at least theoretically) allow for faster and more reliable data transfer between the two burners. It is worthwhile to note that although Promise advertises that the controller card was primarily designed for enhanced IDE performance, the card is also supposed to be ATAPI compatible.

In thoery your second idea should be better, in practice it probably wont make much difference at all.

Take option 1. Optical drives performance on Controller cards is often quirky and unreliable. the promise controller cards probably exhibit less problems than cheaper cards but it is still best to use the motherboard controller for optical drives.

best practice always make test iso and read with virtual drive
you may be making non functional disc
or use dvd-rw's for test
I don't know how slow the disc to disc process is
under normal controller setup option 1

good luck

Thanks for your responses. From what you're saying, it sounds like there isn't a clear winner here, although the Promise controller might possibly offer a theoretical edge in performance, while the motherboard controller might possibly be more reliable. Since I'll be burning directly from one DVD to another, for me reliability is more important than performance, so I'm leaning towards Option 1.

Question ... I recall that same-channel master/slave configurations between disparate devices (for example, a hard disk drive and an optical devices) should be avoided. Can I correctly assume that this is not the case here, since both are ATAPI devices (although the DVD burners are from different manufacturers)?

As long as the chipsets in the two burners dont have compaitability issues ( which is pretty rare these days.) then it should not be a problem. The best setup for DVD burning is using sata hard drives and having your DVD burners as master on seperate IDE channels.

You can try option 2. The promise controllers have about the best track record for compaitability with optical drives, out of all the controllers out there.