IDE wire-up settings for multiple drives

[lakymatics]

IÂ’m refreshing my system and reinstalling my O.S.Â’s and programs.
I have setup partitions and dual boot before on a single hard drive so hopefully I can still do this with no problems. But this time I have 2 internal 80GB drives and a firewire 80GB drive. I also heave a CDR-DVD drive and a standard CD drive. I would want one of the hard drives as a backup and one as a scratch disk the other would be partitioned and hold 2 O.S.Â’s, IÂ’m not sure whether the firewire drive is best used as a backup drive or a scratch disk. I need advice on the best configuration for plugging into IDE1 or IDE2 and Master/slave settings for all the drives. Any help appreciated.

I was speaking to someone today who has built his own computer for the same purpose as mine (eg, graphics & video post) and he was quite adiment that the 2 drives should be used as masters on each IDE channel and the 2 CD drives as slaves. I can see his point as I don't need the highest speed possible when writing or copying from a Cd, but do need the best access speed for rendering my productions to my 2nd disk. your views please......

 

[xotix]

its a not a good idea to put both optical drives on the same ide channel. its also a good idea to put the hard drives on master on each channel. giving u the option that your friend suggested.