Master HD - Slave DVD in same IDE channel
 

Any truth to this?

I have the HD on primary and CD/DVD on secondary

I think the quote above is more a solution to an architectural problem than a performance option

That's what I figured; as most OEM setup for saving a few cents, and has nothing to do with performance.

the placement of the drives is only so the cables can be placed more conveniently.

there is truth to this. a DVD rom drive is only for reading, so overall access is not that important. the OS sits on a Master drive = correct.

the CDRW needs to have a enough data flowing to it; so setting it as master is not a bad idea, I had the same setup once. It makes burning coaster a harder job, but with the introduction of burn-proof that's pretty much over also.

when writing a CD from 2nd HDD you'll still experience system slowdowns; but when writing CD's from the HDD with OS you will notice better performance with CDRW as master compared to setting it as slave.


with the advantage of having 1001 PATA/SATA connectors on today motherboards you can set pretty much all your devices as MASTER anyways :)

I always thought the IDE PATA interface was unable to read/write to two devices on the same bus at the same time. One or the other.
Indeed this problem is getting more irrelevant with time passing.

I thought you shouldn't put your hdd's on the same controller as the optical drives because data trasport would only be as fast as the weekest link in the chain?

if your optical drive does not support DMA; you're stuck @ PIO mode

I always put HD on the same IDE chan and dvdrw + cdreader also on the same IDE.