I recently happened on an "upgrade" of an old CD-RW drive (upgrading the lack of any to begin with). I had my HD on IDE channel 0 M/S, and my existing CD drive on IDE channel 1 single. I put the new addition on IDE channel 1 as 'slave', reconfigured the old CD drive (I think, whatever, it's 'master' now).

so
0: HD master/single
1: CD master, CDRW slave

WinXP likes it, everything's fine and I have drive letters A-G with all my partitions. Nero seems fine with it except it recommended I put my optical drives on different channels- it would copy CDs faster and/or with less errors.

Is Nero's suggestion valid? Is Win XP a troublemaker here? Would an older IDE controller/BIOS/anything be a problem? (everything in my computer is old)

And if I need to reconfigure, how should I? Just the physical placement of my drive bays would make it very difficult to put my HD and an optical drive on the same channel.

I don't have the CD drives' manufacturer names offhand (no connection/pcguide at home), they're both old, but there aren't any physical problems with them.

Again, thanks in advance for any help.

Yes, nero is right about this, but it only applies to CD to CD copies. The theory is that the IDE port cannot handle the data fast enough and can cause errors when doing a direct copy.

However, newer motherboards have IDE ports that can handle this, and it is as easy to copy the CD to your HD, and then copy from there! easier too if you want to make multiple copies.

david

I wouldn't worry so much about putting them on different channels, but I would switch the CDRW to the Master position and the CD to the Slave position. Generally it is probably a good idea to make the more advanced drive the Master....

Like david eaton says, it only applies to CD-to-CD copying. The reason is because of a limitation in the IDE channel architecture - it's not capable of accessing more than one device at a time. This is a limitation of IDE in general and is true of all IDE, not just the older ones.

Also keep in mind that even the "old" IDE transfer speed of ATA/33 is faster than any optical drive can hope to achieve so I wouldn't worry about the basic system being old.

Personally, I keep my hard drives on one IDE connector, and my optical drives on the other (just like you have done). CD-to-CD copying is often unrealiable at best so there's no point in "optimizing" your system for it. :rolleyes:

And sometimes a system will recognize all of the optical drives only if they are connected in one specific way.