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I currently have my HDD as primary master, DVD-ROM as secondary master & CD-RW as secondary slave. I bought yesterday a DVD-RW (LG-4163), and I was wondering where exactly should I install it.. One thought is to have the CD-RW as primary slave along with the HDD, and DVD-RW & DVD-ROM in secondary channel(primary & slave). But many have told me that if I have an optical drive in the same channel with my HDD, this will slow my HDD down. Is this true? And if this is the case, does this only happen when they work in the same time? Because this will only happen when I record CD’s. Or does this affect my pc’s performance even when the CD-RW is idle??
I could get rid of the CD-RW, but I thought if this is ok, I could keep it and use it for my CD recordings, so that I won’t push my DVD-RW too much.. Also I don’t wanna put any extra controllers, because then I would be pushing my PSU.
Any opinions??

It will make no difference. No single consumer HDD on the market can consistently take up even half of the allotted bandwidth of a ATA-100 cable. Mix and match without worry.

It should work fine as long as you don't try burning from that HDD to the optical drive on the same chain.

Here's how I would set it up:
HDD=Primary Master
DVD-ROM=Primary Slave

DVD-RW=Secondary Master
CD-RW=Secondary Slave

@Boba_Fett I have a 80GB WD 7200rpm HDD. I just bought the DVD-RW you bought(LG-4163), I hope it's good..

@burninfool this makes sense, I couldn't burn to the DVD-ROM, only copy from DVD-ROM to HDD, but I could do that using some device from the other channel (CD-RW or DVD-RW)

I had decided to dump my DVD-ROM, it's crappy anyway (SONY DDU1621 with old firmware which i CAN'T update since I have v1.6 and after 1.7 it goes to 2.xx series-and all the way to v4.1- which I can't install ), but now I guess I could have all three..

I only hope that my PSU (LC-350ATX) can support all 3 optical drives. I also have a GeForce 5200 Ultra FX, 2x256DDR, TV Tuner Pinnacle PCTV.. Oh, and P4 2,4GHz..

I think that the power supply will work well for you.

i have a 400W power supply and running a dvd writer,cdrw drive, 4 X seagate barracuda hdd's and everything is perfect.

Boba_Fett wrote:It will make no difference. No single consumer HDD on the market can consistently take up even half of the allotted bandwidth of a ATA-100 cable. Mix and match without worry.

It doesn't really have to do with the bandwidth. It has to do with master/slave operations. I echo what Ian said, if he doesn't burn from the HDD to the burner on the same IDE channel, he should be fine.

Actually, I'd probably do what Burninfool recommended, and put the DVD-ROM as slave.

Yeah, its not so much the bandwidth but rather the way Parallel ATA does read/write requests.

Ian wrote:Yeah, its not so much the bandwidth but rather the way Parallel ATA does read/write requests.

Yeah, this is one of the reasons I went with SATA hard disks...it lets me have my DVD-ROM and my DVD burner each as master on their own PATA interface.

I'm not up with the newest ATA speeds, but I remember I had this as an issue with this in the past. A 12X CD Burner would only go up to 8X if set up on the same one as HD. THat was back in the days