IDE drive connections

[WildKat]

at the moment I have my two hard disks as primary master and primary slave, and my two optical drives as secondary master and secondary slave. would it lead to faster performance to buy a longer ide cable and mix up the primary channel with a hard disk and optical drive and same for secondary channel?

also would it be perfectly compatible to use new round ata133 ide cables between for example my ata100 hard disk and dvd rom drive or will that mean i can only transfer data as fast as my slowest drive?

would the drive letters change, affecting installed programs?

cheerz!

[Aaron]

at the moment I have my two hard disks as primary master and primary slave, and my two optical drives as secondary master and secondary slave. would it lead to faster performance to buy a longer ide cable and mix up the primary channel with a hard disk and optical drive and same for secondary channel?

Yep, transfers from one hard drive to another will have improved in speed. The fastest hard drive runs at the same speed as the slower hard drive when its on the same IDE cable, so seperating them is a good idea. You'll also be able to copy CDs on the fly when both of your CD-ROMS are on seperate cable. Just make sure your CD-RW is using the Master cable, and switched as Master.

Would the drive letters change, affecting installed programs?

Not exactly sure. I've always done a clean install when I change something major inside my PC, such as installing a new hard drive. You should be able to change the drive letters via Computer Management > Drive Management however.

[WildKat]

but doesnt an optical drive run at ata33? so putting a ata33 device with my ata100 hard drive would cause it to run at ata33 wouldnt it??

when i get the longer cables i plan to have this setup:

primary master: main hard disk ata100

primary slave: dvd rom drive

secondary master: second hard disk ata100

secondary slave: cdrw drive

good or bad?

cheers

[Drewdatrip]

Running a Cd Rom and a Hd on the same ribbin is no longer an issue, thankx to the advancments in the Motherboards bus master, slower drives do not set the high point of data trasfer on an IDE chain.

=Drew