Thomas McGahee wrote: > Place your Hard Drive and regular CDROM drive on the 1st IDE > controller. > > Place your CDROM burner on the 2nd IDE controller. > > This allows concurrent operation of the CDROM burner and the other > devices, slightly speeding up the transfer of data TO the CDROM > burner. and Anand Dhuru replied: > Thomas, it is not a good idea to cascade CD-ROMs and HDDs on the > same channel, especially in today's fast ATA-66 motherboards; this > affects the throughput from your hard disks. You're both right; interleaved IDE read/write operations don't work very well, and putting a slow PIO-mode CDROM drive on the same IDE channel as a fast UDMA hard drive will prevent the hard drive from running at its fastest speed. To solve both of these problems simultaneously, put your hard drives on one channel and your CDROM and CD-RW drives on the other, then never copy directly from CDROM to CD-RW. Instead, copy from CDROM to an image on the hard drive, then from that image back to the CD-RW. With today's fast hard drives, the overhead for a single copy is practically unnoticeable. If you're making multiple copies, this method is, of course, even faster than direct disc-to-disc copying. Most CD-burning software gives you the option to do this automatically, so you don't have to explicitly do two copies... Some programs, in fact (like "Nero Burning ROM", my CD-burning program of choice, available from http://www.nero.com), make the "copy through an image on the hard drive" option the default behavior. -Andy === Andrew Warren - fastfwd@ix.netcom.com === Fast Forward Engineering - San Diego, California === http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2499 -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.