Premium: Some general questions

I have some Qs about the Premium. Thanks in advance for the help:

My equipment:

Board: Asus P4C800E-Deluxe
RAM: 1GB Corsair
Latest drivers and BIOS (Intel chipset Installation Utyl, etc).
Primary IDE:
Master: Pioneer DVD-ROM DVD 106s - UDMA4
Slave: Plextor CD-R Premium - UDMA2
Secundary IDE:
Master: BenQ DW1620 DVDRW - UDMA2
Slave: None
Primary Intel SATA:
Maxtor 6B300SO - UDMA5

1. Is it better to have the Premium as master in its IDE channel? Or I remove the Pioneer DVD-ROM and let the Premium be alone? This is something that I don't like to do unless absolutely necessary. I love the trayless system of the Pioneer and I don't think it would be wise to put it with my DVDRW as I think this needs more freedom than the CD-RW.

2. Is it OK to burn 2 discs at the same time being the 2 burners in 2 diferent IDE channels like I have? I have tried this with Nero 6 and I can do it but I don't know if it is recommended.

3. When my Premium is burning Windows always blinks the mouse pointer with the small CD access icon, not when I am on a text page like notepad, but everywhere else (IE, windows desktop, etc). Is this normal?

4. Do you still recommend EAC for audio extractions? Or is there something better out there.

Thanks a lot.

Sometimes problems occur because two drives do not like to be on the same IDE channel. I've experienced that once with HDDs. There is no performance gain in making your Premium master. I'm running two Plextor DVDRs on the same IDE channel here with no problems at all. So if this setup works, just leave it alone.

Short answer: Yes, you can do it. Long answer: The key question is wether your HDD is fast enough to provide enough data to both of your burners simultaneously. Even if it fails to do so both drives have buffer underrun protection (burn proof) so the burns will not fail because of low data-flow rate. While buffer underrun occurrences are totally transparent on the written discs one might nevertheless want to avoid them. It's just one thing less that could possibly go wrong. However i've never heard of a disc being faulty because of the burn proof function.

Can't remember ever having seen this. But then I usally leave my computer alone while burning with the burning app in front. I dont' think this is a indication of a problem whatsoever.

When using a Plextor drive Plextools offers at least equal or even better functionality IMHO. If you transcode to MP3: Since version 2.24 LAME support in Plextools has been greatly increased.

1.) Leave the Premium where it is. Take care when burning GigaRec and reading DVDs this may cause bufferunderruns.

2.) I also burn two discs at the same time and never had Problems. When reading from same harddisc you may be able to achieve 167 DVD and 48x CD at the same time.

3.) I also remember to have had a blinking cursor (not now but some time ago). No need to worry.

4.) EAC is good.

Thank You all. I will be installing PlexTools soon to see if it lives to the expectations.