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I have two hard discs and Plextor Premium and Plextror PX-708A. The Plextors are internal (ATAPI). Which is the best way to connent them on Primary and Secondary channel?

I would suggest:

Primary Channel:
-Boot HDD Master
-Other HDD Slave

Secondary Channel:
-Plextor PX-708A Master
-Plextor Premium Slave

This is almost exactly how my setup is (instead of the PX-708A I have a LiteON 48125W) and it works fine for me

Please note that with the above scenario, your ability to write from one optical to another will be somewhat limited.

I know this has been debated before, and sometimes you just have to use the order which works, but I'd put opticals on different channels (primary slave, secondary slave for example).

That way you can read and write to both drives at the same time (if doing on-the-fly copies for example), assuming your HDs are not active at that time.

Yeah, there are pro's and con's to each set up.

I like my setup because I never burn "on the fly" and because it allows me to burn 2 discs at once with data from either (or both) HDDs

if doing on-the-fly copies for example

Copying on the fly can be done with both drives on one channel, it's one operation, not 2. I do it here at 48x with no troubles. While there are several good reasons to have optical drives on separate channels, this is not one of them.
If the OP wants to know what will work best for him, he needs to try both ways and see which works best for his needs.

Buy a cheap IDE card, run everything on separate channels and forget about all the master/slave grievances.

Yeah, but some optical drives may not work on certain IDE cards, eg. Lite-Ons on Promise controllers just don't work.

There's a plethora of IDE controllers, but if one opts to own both pieces of incompatible equiptment, one could also place said incompatible equiptment on said motherboards IDE ports while placing hard drives on the controller.

rdgrimes,

I have to be more exact next time :)

It's not technically possible to write and read at the very same instant on both channel master and slave on one parallel ata channel.

As such, when using two optical on the same single parallel ata channel, your computer will have to rapidly alternate between read/write commands with each drive.

While this is probably no problem for modern drives and especially modern CPUs, there is a difference nevertheless, mainly with CPU utilisation. This can also lead to on-the-fly copy speed limitations on slower cpu systems.

As such, I would not recommend two opticals on the same parallel ata channel, if the other arrangement does not cause any problems.

I hope that was more accurate now :)

regards,
Halcyon

Given adequate PCI space and function, I also vote for an IDE controller card to put HD's on, it usually increases HD performance too. That leaves the MB IDE channels free for lots of optical drives.

I would also recommend this setup:

Primary Master: Boot HDD
Primary Slave: Other HDD
Secondary Master: Plextor PX-708A
Secondary Slave: Plextor Premium

I used this setup (except with different optical drives) in my main PC for a while, but I now have an PCI ATA133 controller (and one less hard drive). The hard drive is attached to the PCI ATA133 controller so that I can have three optical drives on the motherboard's IDE channels without connecting an optical drive on the same channel with the hard drive.

Edit: I also do notice an improvement in my HDD performance, especially when resuming from hibernation in Windows XP.

Thanks a lot for your replies! I am thinking of buying an IDE card, so which is now the best way to connect? Should the HDs be on the controller or the optical drives? Has this card any disadvantage comparing to no card and master/slave connection?

If you buy an IDE card, you'll definitely want to connect the hard drives to the IDE card. Then, the optical drives can be connected to the motherboard. I have three reasons for saying this:

1. The hard drives will probably run faster on the IDE card than they would when attached to the motherboard.
2. Optical drives rarely work right when connected to an IDE card.
3. You can't boot from an optical drive on an IDE card, but you can boot from an optical drive attached to the motherboard (assuming your motherboard supports this feature).

Ok, thnx. Any disadvantages of using the card?

There are no real disadvantages that I know of. In fact, the three desktop computers which I use on a regular basis all have PCI IDE controllers.

However, I have noticed a strange performance issue on a couple of old Win98 PCs (Daewoo CB649M-SI motherboards) where the CD drives wouldn't operate at maximum speed if they were connected to the motherboard and the hard drive was attached to a PCI IDE card. I tried installing WinXP on one of these PCs, though, and the problem went away. This problem doesn't occur on my main PC, a two-year-old Athlon 1.2GHz with WinXP. I doubt you will see anything like this; I've never heard of anything like it before (and, apparently, neither had the e-mail technical support department of the company from which I purchased one of these PCI IDE cards).