Putting the DVD and the CD-RW on the same channel would make disk-to-disk copying virtually impossible due to the way ATA only allows one device to talk to the controller at once. For the same reason, if you were to put a hard drive on the same channel as the CD-RW copying files from that HDD to the CD-RW would be impossible. The CD-RW is best given it's own chanell but since thats not an option I'd put a hard drive and the DVD on one channel (probably the primary) and the other hard drive and the CD-RW on the other.

This was discussed in the last few days in this thread:
http://www.ntcompatible.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=23261&highlight=
 
 
H.

admiral couldnt I put the two cd drives on the Promise ata-100 controller each as a master and then put the two HDs on the mobo as master and master
 
with the controller card and two channels on the mobo I essentially have 4 ide channels to work with

Pr-man, I would do the exact opposite of what you said. I would attach the hard drives to the controller and the optical drives to the motherboard controllers. Not all PCI controller cards correctly support PIO devices (cdrom drives, zip drives, ls-120 drives, etc.). Just ensure that your bios supports booting from an add-in card first.

well the reason I was thinking like I was is because under XP I get crappy performance with my HDs on the controller cards. I think its an SP1 issue.
 
I currently have it setup like you suggested and thats why im looking to switch.
 
Would promises site tell me if the card would support PIO?

Possibly, worth a look, at any rate.

This is what my manual says
 
Ultra100 TX2’s two IDE connectors each support a master/slave combination of IDE
devices, including Ultra ATA, EIDE, IDE, Fast-ATA, and ATAPI. Devices of different
standards can be connected to Ultra100 TX2 without performance degradation, due
to the independent programmable timing registers in the controller’s design.

Well, I'd say give it a shot, then. According to the manual, you should be OK.