DVD burners be on their own channel or is Master/Slave OK?

Hi all,

I'm planning to get a new system soon, and I want to get the Striker Extreme 680i board, however, I've noticed that the new crop of MB only have one IDE port for one Master/Slave combination. I'd like to get two optical drives, probably 2 burners since they're below $40 each nowadays.

I remember in the old days, one was advised to put each optical drive as master on their own IDE channel for max thoroughput with DMA enabled. Is this still true today, or can I just put both on the same MB IDE port with Master/Slave combination?

I don't see a lot of SATA optical drives out there - plus using up a potential SATA slot for a Optical Drive seems like a waste. Are SATA to EIDE adapters worth anything?

There are two older EIDE HDDs I'd like to use, so I was thinking of getting a PCI EIDE adapter with dual IDE channels, so I could put the HDDs onto the single port on the MB, and put the two Optical Drives on the PCI adapter each as Master on their own channel (Is this necessary?) Will I encounter boot problems, since I won't have a 3.5 drive in my new system, the CD-ROM or DVD-ROM will be my boot up on a PCI adapter instead of the MB.

Thanks,
Wm

Just get a SATA DVD burner (go for the one Cottonball linked to), and stop worrying about arranging IDE drives for max performance. For the record though, the performance is exactly the same regardless of whether you have 2 optical drives on one IDE channel, or one drive on both channels.

People who claim the performance is not the same suffer from the Placebo effect, where they want something to be (or in this case, to not be) a certain way, so they believe that.

Thanks everyone!

You're right, I'll go with SATA ones - I didn't know they were available at decent prices locally. Plus I'll probably be able to use them in my next computer.

Any comments as to Pioneer vs. Lite-On - they are the same price. I see the Plextor ones that are twice the price, but are they really twice as good? No one seems to do reviews on DVD burners anymore, are they all becoming the same. I remember when I first got dual layer burners, that they were really picky with the media (my NEC 3500 only burns dual layer to Verbatims for example - all else are coasters).

Thanks,
Wm