Hi PCBUILDers:

Recently I read an article written by John Q. Chin, from the
Nospin Group., available at http://nospin.com.
In his introduction to this article named "IDE Hard Drives," I
found a very interesting detail about connecting IDE drives
and CD ROMs together in the same IDE channel.
In his article, Mr. Chin states:

quote begins:
>"Finally, it should be noted that using a CD-ROM drive on the
>same IDE channel as a hard drive will usually adversely affect
>the performance of the hard drive. Most CD-ROM drives are not
>compatible with the specification for 32-bit disk access under
>Windows. Consequently, 32-bit disk access is not available to
>the hard drive when a CD-ROM drive is installed on the same IDE
>interface.  Further, the CD-ROM drive is likely to operate at a
>lower PIO mode than the hard drive.  Therefore, you should not
>pair your primary hard drive with a CD-ROM drive."
quote ends.

Connecting CDROMs as slave drives in the same flat ribbon cable
as the HDD and in the same IDE channel, (Win95/98 as OS) has been
my common practice during a long time.  Suddenly, I found I
was doing wrong. :-(
I then checked again some MOBOs and CDROMs manuals looking for
some warnings about this matter. I found none and I am about to
think that this is a tricky aspect of PCBUILDing.
So my question is: Should a CDROM drive be connected (if possible)
as Secondary Slave in the Secondary IDE Channel when the master
HDD is at the primary IDE channel?

Thanks in advance.

Frank.

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