IDE Hard Drive + DVD Burner on Same Channel

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trekkie00

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Right now, I have a 120gb IDE hard drive sitting in an older computer that I won't be able to use for college. I have a newer one, but it only has one IDE channel (max two devices) with a DVD burner on it. I've heard bad things about putting a disc drive and hard drive on the same channel. Are these justified, or will it probably work just fine? It'd be a secondary hard drive, I have a primary SATA one.
 
I'm currently have a sata dvd drive and a sata haddrive on my pc and on the ide slot i have a another dvd drive as master and a 100gb hardrive as slave on same cable, and i haven't had any problems yet.
 
Bad things? I think they should have been a bit more specific for you :)

You should avoid putting a hard drive (especially one with the OS or programs) on the same IDE channel as a CD/DVD drive. Reason being that the cable will now run only as fast as the slowest component, which is the CD/DVD drive. So architectually, you should always avoid putting a hard drive and CD/DVD drive on the same channel. If you have another IDE channel put the hard drive on that, and leave the CD/DVD to its own channel.

Nothing 'bad' will happen, it is perfectly fine. Nothing is going to happen with this configuration, it is just that your hard drive will now transfer data much slower to the MB because of the DVD drive. Make sense?
 
Yup, that makes perfect sense. Since this'll just be for backup and file storage, speed isn't an issue. Thanks for clarifying the issue!
 
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