ide channels oh my god!

[luvvbuzz]

heres my proposed problem.
i have a dvd burner, and also a dvd player for my pc, 2 separate drives. i also have one cdrewriter, one master hard drive and one slave hard drive. i currently have 2 ide channels on my motherboard. currently on my computer i have all the above installed except the dvd player.
i have just recently bought myself a pci ide controller which has an extra 2 ide connectors on it so that i can have more ide devices on my computer.
i want to have the dvd player and the dvd rewriter installed cos i want to rip using the dvd player, so my dvd burner only has the job of burning dvds, that way i hope to conserve its life span by not over using the motor inside it etc.
i want to keep all my other drives on my computer. my problem is deciding/knowing which drives to put on the pci ide controller and which ones to put on the motherboards ide channels. i know i have to keep, or its best to keep the master boot hard drive on my primary motherboard ide channel. the question is, how do i arrange the other drives, including the slave hard drive so that everything works without any glinches and sodding about? should my dvd burner be one the secondary motherboard ide channel? should my cdrw drive be on the primary motherboard ide channel with the master hard drive?
its quite confusing really. if anybody got the time to help me figure it out please feel free to add your comments here.

[808smokey]

Personally I would set it up like this. But there's various opinions throughout this forum. Just browse this forum and you'll see the different setups. I only suggest putting the CD-RW seperate since you said you backup/copy DVD's. I would also try burning a CD-RW with the setup below and then try burning the same files to the same CD-RW with the burners in opposite IDE locations. Then see which way is faster and leave the drives setup in that configuration.

Primary IDE
Master - Boot HDD
Slave - Storage HDD
Secondary IDE
Master - DVD Burner
Slave - DVD-ROM
IDE Controller Card
CD-RW

Some other setups are like this:
Primary IDE
Master - Boot HDD
Slave - DVD-ROM
Secondary IDE
Master - DVD Burner
Slave - Storage HDD
IDE Controller Card
CD-RW Burner

It really depends on what you want to do. I know from personal experience that the various brands of burners I've used ALL had to be configured as "Master" or they would not work properly.

[luvvbuzz]

thanks for the reply but i really wanted to find out which devices would be better off on the motherboards ide channels and which would ok to run from the pci ide controllers 2 channels. as i say, i reckon the best bet is to keep the boot up hard drive on the motherbaords master ide channel, but as regards the other drives im not sure which to go on the pci card and which others to go on the motherboards ide channels.

[Piccoro]

Usually IDE pci expantion cards have 2 controllers. You can really spread out your drives among the 4 controllers then (2 onboard, 2 pci expantion).
I would put your optical drives on the expantion card unless the expantion card is ata133 and your board only is ata100. Than you would want the better performance drives on the ide pci card.

[gmatov]

Piccoro,

Your 133 ATA card will not pass data over a 100 buss at 133. The buss cannot transfer data faster than it is "vibrating", for want of a better word.

The buss is always the bottleneck.

[luvvbuzz]

it says my pci ide card is ata133 on the box, so does this mean i can connect my dvdplayer and a slave hard drive to it?

[luvvbuzz]

shall i take that as no then?