DVD Writer installation with a little twist

Recently I bought a "NEC ND1300A DVD+/- Dual Format Recorder & RW With Pinacle Software" for £130 off the net.

Question One: Is it a reasonable drive for the price etc...

Question Two: On one IDE-bus on my computer I have a single HDD installed, while on the other I have a CD-RW and DVD drive on it.

When I come to instaling this new DVD-RW I would like to have one disc drive with the hard drive and the other on its own (so when copying CD to CD they are not on the same bus). How do I go about this? Would I just plug the new burner in with HDD? Should I remove one of the existing ones? How do I determine the master/slave situation?

Newbie question and a pain in the butt, but all help is great!!

To determine Master/Slave configurations, I use a nice little FREE program called Nero Infotool. Here is a link

http://www.cdspeed2000.com/go.php3?link=download.html

http://img.villagephotos.com/p/2003-8/324335/settings.JPG

You're very lucky to have that burner, I think it is AWESOME and produces quality burns. That image shows my setup: I have two hard drives on my Primary IDE Channel, and my CDRW and DVD-RW are on my Secondary Channel.

With regards to your question, I don't know if it will make much of a difference PERSONALLY if you install your burner as a slave to your hard drive, however, to err on the side of caution you could set your CDRW jumper to Slave and hook that up to your hard drive on your Primary IDE, and set your DVD-RW jumper to master and swap the CDRWs place. Check with InfoTool to verify your current setup and adjust it accordingly.

That Pinnacle software works great with the burner, and I also recommend DiscJuggler and DVD Decrypter as well.

Hope some of that information was helpful, the weather is a bit chili here...

You'd better look at the drive access speed. Newer hd's tend to be 66 or better while most cd/dvd driver ethier player or burner tend to be 33. Placing a 33 with anthing higher will slow down the faster component to the lowest speed. So if your cd/dvd drives are all 33 and your hd is 66 then placing any cd/dvd on the hd cable will slow down your hd access. :o

Thank you for the lengthy post freestyler!

Using courtrrb's post in respect to speed, I might have the Harddrive on one and the DVDrom and DVDrw on the other... The only reason I would change it is because Nero suggests the drives be on different busses for 'on the fly' copies...

The CD-RW can go in the other machine due to it only having the one drive and that can be used for 'on the fly' as I doubt many DVDs will copy straight off...

Thanks again for the helpful replies!!