have new asus a7v266-e board with 60gig wd 7200 ata100, plextor 24/10/40 and asus dvd e-616. i was planning on making them all master with their own separate ribbon going to their own ide connection. is this a good idea? if not, what is your advice? thanks,
obxeye
if you have 3 IDE controllers this is possible
Else I would suggest the harddrive on Primary master, writer on secondary master
Depending on the kind of raid-controller that your board has got (the 3rth and 4th IDE port) it’s possible/impossible to connect other devices then harddrives to it. For your case, it could be (probably) that you’ll have to connect the hdd to your raid-controller and the cdrw/dvd to your normal ide controller. That should work!
Well, the only advice I’ve got is - Don’t connect the CD-Reader and CD-Writer to same cable if possible!
If you do this, they will both share bandwidth on one 33Mb/sec bus. That makes it hard/impossible to copy CD’s on the fly (straight from CD-Reader to CD-Writer)
33Mb bandwidth for two drives should be enough (yeah, it’s probably what all of you are thinking) but it caused problems and buffer underruns for me (and no, my CD-Reader is not slow).
Administrators - do you people really have thousands of posts? 
thanks for the answers everyone.
obxeye