New Harddrive, How should I hook it up?

[PunkRawk911]

Ok, so for a long time I've been using just a single Western Digital 80Gb 8mb cache harddrive. My music collection is finally getting large enough that I really needed a new drive. So, I saw a sale in the Best Buy circular and picked up a Seagate 120Gb 8mb cache drive for $40. Anyways, so I've got two EIDE harddrives, and a DVD-Rom drive. Currently I've got the old harddrive and the DVD drive each as masters on their own channels. So, when I put the new drive in, should I make it a master or a slave, and should I have itt share the same channel as the other harddrive, or as the DVD-rom drive. To make this question even more complicated, I'm planning on reformatting soon and setting up a dual boot with XP and Debian Linux. So, what do I do, make a partition for each on the primary harddrive (the Western Digital), and then should I make a partition on the new drive for the swap file for XP? I've heard that this can increase performance?


So, yeah, any help would be greatly appreciated.

[mateo]

I'm unsure about the OS situation, as I don't really know how the bootloaders work. I'd suggest putting the new HDD as master on the channel with the DVD as the slave, if you're keeping yourself to these two channels. You could add an IDE controller card for pretty cheap if you want to find one used, but I suspect the gains would be minimal. Ideally, WinXP would go on one, Debian on the other, along with the swap file. If you can do that, though, I don't know.