opinions for IDE arrangement

[rallynavvie]

I've got 2 IDE channels off my motherboard and one RAID controller with 2 additional channels. Each has a cable select cable. I have 6 total IDE devices operating currently. The current arrangement is as follows:
Mobo primary IDE: 120GB HDD master (boot drive), Liteon 166 DVD-ROM slave
Mobo secondary: 200GB HDD master (storage drive), Pioneer 104 DVD-RW slave
RAID primary: 80GB HDD master (stripe)
RAID secondary: 80GB HDD master (stripe)
Also a Pioneer 104 in a FireWire enclosure

I've been told that slave drives on an IDE channel run slower than a master and suffer when communicating between slave and master on the same channel. If that is true do the data rates of my optical drives suffer from being on slave or are they well below the data rate capability of the IDE cable? Or is my set-up pretty good for data transfer (or about as good as it'll get without additional controllers)? Or should I not even worry about it.

I already follow other procedures for rips/burns like when I rip from the DVD-ROM I rip to the other channel HDD (the 200GB), author/reencode to the 120GB drive, then burn to the DVD-RW. I use the RAID drive for captures and sometimes authoring use. I'm thinking of maybe adding more 200GB drives to the slave channels of the RAID controller for additional storage (I've got 160GB used on the 200GB storage drive currently) but I'm not too concerned about data rate on those drives as they'll only see archiving usage.

Thanks again for the help!

[Piccoro]

I also have my cddrives as slaves w/2 harddrives primary.
It depends on what you do. Burn cds from which harddrive to the cd? have them on oposite ide cables...err...controlers*samething. Any videoecoding/file transfer....have em on oposite controlers. I only think the optical drives will run slower if you use the master at the same time, it has priority i believe.

[Gazorgan]

There is no difference between master and slave, it's just a distinction over which is which.

You configuration is fine, no 'obvious errors' Remember, that with IDE (as opposed to SCSI) drives do not talk to each other, all data must bounce though the controller (scsi lets drives communicate directly without using the controller). So for going from master to slave, the data goes master--controller--(cache)--slave over and over. For different controllers(dual channel, ie 4 drives 2 cables) it goes drive1--controller--(cache)--drive2. You can see a speed improvement in the second configuration since it is reading from drive 1 while writing to drive 2, as opposed to master/slave that is reading or writing, not both. It really on matters when copying 7 GB of VOB's around.

If you have 2 different physical controllers (as say an add-in card) then it goes drive1--controller1-(cache)--PCI Buss--controller2-(cache)--drive2. This may appy to your RAID, it depends on how the controller is configured and how the chipset works