HD jumper settings what is best?

[tape]

Quick questioin about internal hard drives. I have dell dimention 4600. Main HD was 250 Gb with second HD w/ 120 Gb. I had the jumpers set as the master for main (center set of pins) and the second HD as Slave (2nd set of pins). This was based on the dirs from disk mfg. Western Digital. I upgraded the main HD to 320 Gb and reformated my original main to be the second HD. I set both jumpers to Cable Select (the first set of pins, the default setting) becasue the owner's manual from dell says this is the correct setup. I am noticing very slow movement of data between the 2 drives. A file movement using "COPY" of a 256 MB file uses 100% of my cpu and just about shuts down my computer. Trying to move more than 2 files at one time will freeze up my dell. I've got lots of ram and the processor has never given me such slow action. The XP had been just installed on the new drive and I have a minimum of apps loaded. Can the jumpers be switched to see if that has caused some of my problems without messing up the data on the drives?

[shadowpr]

Not sure, but do you have sp3 installed yet?

[glc]

Cable select is the correct way to do it. However, any time you have two hard drives on the same IDE channel, transfers between them will be slow. That's because it's a one way bus.

Make sure you have 80 wire IDE cables on both channels, and swap drives as necessary with the opticals to put the two hard drives on separate channels. Jumper everything cable select and put the desired master drive on the end of the cable.

[tape]

GLC,
The ribbon cable is the one that came with my pc. How can I tell if it is 80 wire? I don't follow your suggestion about swapping drives with optical drives. I have two opticals installed.

[glc]

Split the drives up. Put one hard drive and one optical on each channel. The primary cable should be 80 wire, but the secondary cable may not be. You can tell the difference by looking, the ribs on a 40 wire are larger. One rib per wire.

Boot hard drive should be primary master. It doesn't matter what the other 3 are, but I'd probably leave whichever optical you use the most on the secondary as master and slave the other hard drive to it.