I suggest that the question of "where to place different drives and
why" to be converted to FAQ and placed on PCBUILD site... this topic
pops often, and the answers are similar. I can compile the HTML for it.

  Here is the reasoning behind placing IDE drives.

  First, the soundcard IDE connector will accept only _ONE_ and only
_CDROM_ drive. This said, there are to's and con's to this:
  to's : you free up one space in conventional IDE controller
         if you have at least one high-speed device [HD] on each channel
           you possibly will benefit from speed increase [slower device
           removed].
 con's : the cdrom could stop being bootable if you move it
         sometimes a proprietary sound card driver must be loaded to
           control the CD -> "universal drivers" will fail, and subseq.
           the Win98 installation boot disk will fail as well until you
           add the driver manually

  The standard channels : If you can, place one device on each channel
  Otherwise arrange all fast devices on one channel and the rest at other;
  if you're no other option, arrange drives in all sorts of patterns
and measure performance.
  If you have a real lot of drives [all 4 places busy]... at this point
you should consider SCSI as a much better option for handling that lot of
drives [but also much more costly].
  One more note. SOme really old IDE's [I still have 102M IDE for minor
file transfers] can be single drives ONLY on their channel. any other
combination would freeze at POST... read the older stuff's manuals and
check if these devices can be moved freely.

  This should help...
  And to your question : of course, you can leave your old A: drive. This
is really handy sometimes.

<> Max Timchenko [MaxVT]
<>
<> [log in to unmask]

On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Harvey Rose wrote:

> This has likely been ask before.
> What is the best way to install this floppy drive? I have 3 IDE connections
> available. Two on the mother board and 1 on the sound card. Since the LS120
> is IDE Atapi, should I install it has a master drive or leave it as CS.
> Should the hardrive be a slave? Can one install a regular floppy drive also
> and have one has A and the other as B?
>
>
> Harvey Rose
> [log in to unmask]

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