On 23 May 98 at 7:44, Bill & Andrea Lee wrote:

>     I just bought a PII 266 system, Asus P2B motherboard (100 MHz, BX
> chipset), 6.4 Quantum Fireball, 32x CD-ROM. Both the HD and CD are on
> the primary channel. Is this setup compromising performance? Should the
> CD be moved to the secondary channel?

  This is probably not an issue, actually.  Note that this is a 32x
drive, in a brand new system.  IF the system locks each EIDE channel
to the PIO mode of the slower device (and this appears to no longer
be the case with newer chipsets) THEN this will only be an issue if
the CD-ROM drive supports only mode 1 or 2 (which was common in 1x,
2x and maybe 4x drives).
  Odds are good that both the BX chipset and the 32x drive have made
the conventional wisdom about putting these drives on separate
channels obsolete.  If you have some favourite benchmarks available
to run, you might experiment, but I wouldn't be surprised to find
that moving the CD-ROM to the secondary channel has little or no
effect.

David G