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hi,

can anybody help.
i would like to know if possible if i can connect the hard drive
& dvd-rom & dvd burner to seperate ribbons and set them all to
master , ie- eide 1 , eide2, eide3,.
i know its common to connect the hard drive to eide 1 (master)
& dvdrom & dvdburner to eide2 on the same ribbon (master& slave).
is it possible , and would it be better for performance.
if they both need to go on the same ribbon, which would be
best for master as i use the dvd-rom quite alot but also
use the dvd-burner quite a lot , it will be used as my main
cdr-r burner aswell as dvd -r+r burner or does it matter.

many thanks,
dell.
artec - dvd rom 16X48
plextor px-708a -8x dvd+r & 40xcd-r .

It is possible in general. I don't know the specifics of that motherboard, but if it has an on-board RAID controller, put the hard drive on that interface, and put the two optical drives on the two channels of the regular IDE interface. If it doesn't have an on-board RAID controller, you will need to get and install an additional PCI IDE controller card (e.g. SIIG or Promise) and put the hard drive on it.

But I don't personally think it is necessary in your situation to have each drive on its own channel. Make the hard drive master on the first channel, and either put the two optical drives together on the second channel (if you will do more optical drive to hard drive / hard drive to optical drive transfers) or make the DVD-ROM slave on the first channel (if you do more on-the-fly burns).

People have different opinions, and others will disagree with my recommendation. Do some searching and you will find a lot of posts about these kinds of issues. Read up and make the final decision yourself, although in truth I don't think you will see much practical difference no matter how you set it up.

cfitz