Will the physical HD connection setup affect data transfer speed?

[sbrown02]

I've got 3 HD's in my system and I want to setup the physical connections to maximize data transfer/throughput speed between the drives.

My options for physically connecting the drives are as follows:

- I've got 1 open IDE port (my Primary IDE) with the cable on this port allowing for two physical HD connections.
- I've got 1 open RAID port (Primary RAID) with the cable on this port allowing for two physical HD connections.
- I've got a 2nd open RAID port (Secondary RAID) with the cable on this port also allowing for two physical HD connections.

So here's my question. Is it better to have two of my three HD's hanging off of one IDE port and cable, or should I connect each HD to a different physical port (Primary IDE, Primary RAID, and Secondary RAID)?

Which approach is the best for data transfer speed between the physical drives? I'll be doing backups from two of the drive's to the third drive and would like to think I'm setting this up for maximum speed advantage.

Thanks

[glc]

Data transfer is always faster when it's going across different cables as opposed to from one drive to another on the same cable.