Best configuration for my IDE hard drives, DVD & CDRW?

[Wayniac]

If you can conect 8 drives this means you have 2 RAID ports? I'm not sure.

Myc cousin conected his 4 devices as you suggested, and suffered a performance hit as his cd-rom was sharing the ide port with a much-faster hard drive. Worse still, we had trouble enabling "DMA" on the second IDE channel under Win98 OS2. Once enabled the cd-writer wasn't recognised - even scanning for drives in the BIOS proved futile!

This problem dissapeared when I re-connected the drives as suggested in my cd-writer's instructions:

Primary Master = fastest hard drive you've got
Primary Slave = your other hard drive

Secondary Master = CD-ROM/DVD drive
Secondary Slave = CD-Writer

Connecting in this way made no problems at all with copying or BIOS recognition - or DMA!

To be totally honest, I don't know whether or not connecting your drives on their own seperate ports would improve compatibility or performance, or whether mixing ATA-100/66 drives lowers performance.

However, I'd say that if you've got the capability to use ATA-100/RAID then by all means get the most out of your system that you can. Sticking cd-roms together creates less problems than mixing them with hard-drives.

Sorry I can't offer you any more info. Perhaps someone more informed can recommened an even better configuration. :-)