I have tried searching but I keep forgetting what Im looking for and spend ages just reading the posts.

Im sure I read a tweak guide but cant find it.

anyway a quick reply without abuse will make me happy.

Should the 2 hds be on the same channel master and slave with the cd burner and dvd palyer on the other as master and slave

or should I have 1 hd as master with the burner as slave and the other hd as secondary master with the dvd as slave.

basically Im trying to get the best performance for my video editing which required a fair bit of hd use,


system
A7n8x deluxe, 1024 ddr gforce 4 ti4200 maxtor 30 gig 7200hd system
Maxtor 120gig split 20 and 100gig
usual other stuff.

Thanks in advance

For best disc performance keep the HD's on a different channel to the dvd or cd burner. Each channel performs at the speed of the slowest item on that channel.

Hmm...

Master: Hard Drive 1
Slave: Hard Drive 2

Master: CDR (or regular CDROM)
Slave: DVD

That is how mine is setup (well it was when I had two hard drives, since I have a 120GB HD now I dont bother wasting a molex connector to connect my old 10GB or 4GB hard drives).

How fast your hard drive performs when connected to the same channel as your cdrom, depends on your controller. It isn't true that performance slows down when you have a cdrom on the same channel as your hard drive, and a quick benchmark using SiSoft Sandra will tell you that. Performance only slows down if your are accessing both drives at the same time as they share a cable. This will also happen with two hard drives connected to the same channel, and you are accessing both drives simultaneously. It really makes very little, if any, difference with todays modern controllers, so do whatever is most convienient for keeping your cables neat and tidy. If you have a fast cd burner, then you might be better having it on a separate controller to minimise sharing the data connection, though with burnproof feature being common on todays drives it shouldn't make much difference.

It is true that when you have cdrom on the same channel as HD, you lose performace.

Most CDROMS support only ATA33 and so the HD will have to run at ATA33 speed and that is a bottleneck for modern HDs.

If you use both the HDs a lot and the burner and the dvd both support ATA66 or above, it may be better to have the HDs on separate channels

Hmm... I guess someone's forgotten to tell my BIOS & harddrives.. At boot they identify themselves at the correct speeds (133, 100), with my cdrom at Piv4 (if I remember correct)...

And when I run SiSoft, it tells me that they are performing more or less as they should...

And I'm using the following setup:
Channel 1 HDD
Channel 2 HDD, DVD

(It would have been:
Channel 1: HDD, DVD
Channel 2: HDD, CDRW
But I don't have enough space for the cdrw.... )

I don't think that rule of keeping the HDs and CDs separate applies to modern motherboards and modern OSs anymore.

But just in case I'm wrong, I blame it on the fact that I have run RAID for the last 5 years and the CD/DVD devices are the only things on my standard IDE controllers.

This is what WD says..

Ah, that explains it...

Well thanks for the replies.

It should be fine as it is then.