2nd hard drive installation tip?

[pcjr]

Anyone have advice on which channel to install a 2nd hard drive which I have set to record shows?
Currently I have both hard drives on the primary controller as master and slave, with my DVD multidrive on the secondary controller. I originally did this because I don't want the DVD drive to limit the transfer bandwidth of the hard drives.

However, I'm thinking if it might be better to have the 2nd hard drive on the secondary controller so that in case I'm using the computer and accessing the 1st hard drive, it won't choke up the 2nd hard drive if it's recording. Does this happen?

I don't use my DVD drive when I'm recording programs to the 2nd hard drive (though I foresee both 2nd hard drive and DVD drive to be active when I'm burning a show to a DVD).

[DonK]

You can place the 2nd hard disk on the secondary controller as master without issue. In most modern systems, you're going to run into a limit on the drives themselves before you really tie the controller up with traffic, so burning a dvd from files on the secondary isn't an issue.

[pcjr]

Any bottleneck by placing both drives on the same controller?

[mcowger]

Yes - only 1 drive can be written to or read from at a time.