install two HD and two CD's

[alkscd]

I have two IDE connector on my motherboard. I have two Hard drives and two CD'S one reg. and the other RW for coping. What is the proper way to hook these up. Thanks

[Force Flow]

Some people would have the 2 HDD's on one IDE ontroller and the CD drives on the other. Others would seperate them. The C: and CD drive on IDE1 and the burner and the other drive on IDE2.

My personal preference is to have the two HDD's on one controller and the CD drives on the other.

[edit]: Course, when it gets to that point, with 4 or more drives, some people just get a RAID motherboard or RAID PCI card.

[Cricket]

Normal setup would be both hard drives on IDE 1 and the CD-ROM and CD-RW on IDE 2.

But if you plan to do a lot of CD to CD copying, you may want to set them up like this...hard drive and CD-RW on IDE 1, hard drive and CD-ROM on IDE 2.

Check the manual for the CD-RW, some are finicky about being master on a IDE channel...some aren't.

Cricket

[Force Flow]

Whoops. I guess I had the 2nd setup CD drives the wrong way. See how often I do it like that? Lol

[reboot]

For maximum speed, put both HD's on IDE 1, and both optical devices on IDE 2.
If you want speed copying one CD to another "on the fly", then put the HD's as master, one on each IDE, and both optical devices as slaves. The ONLY time you would normally put an optical device on the same bus as a hard drive is for this purpose.
If you're not bothered by "on-the-fly-" burning speeds, then definitely keep the opticals both on the second IDE.

[mountaineer]

I probably have less experience than almost anyone on this forum but I have installed my drives both ways. Did not notice a difference either way. I did settle on both hard drives on one channel, both optical drives on the other. This is only because most people advise you do it that way.

[glc]

This might help clarify things - master/slave devices on the same channel do not affect each other's speed unless you are transferring data from one to the other. This is a characteristic of the IDE bus - it's not bidirectional on the same controller. Figure out what you are going to be doing the most of and put the 2 devices that you will be transferring from/to on different channels. Example - you will be copying a lot of CD's on the fly - then you will want the CD drive and the burner on different channels. If you will be mostly burning from the hard drive, put the burner on a different channel than the hard drive.