IDE channel configurations & performance

Apologies if this has been asked millions of times before, but ...

If you have 2 drives in a PC you potentially get better performance if you have them on separate IDE channels, than if there were master and slave of the same channel.

My PC has two ATA133 HDDs on the primary IDE channel, and 2 CD ROMs on the secondary. I have just come accross an old Promise Ultra 66 dual channel controller PCI card. So if I put my 2 HDDs as the master drives of the two mobo IDE channels and run the CD ROMs from this PCI controller (also on separate channels if necessary) am I going to have a potentially higher performing system?

With my existing, and relatively normal setup, I get some CD burning issues that I don't agree with, i.e. my 52x burner writes at about 4 speed when disk to disk copying, while it will write at full speed when burning from HDD.

Thanks.

Your CD Disk to Disk should go faster.

The only time performance takes a hit with your current config is if both drives are being used at the same time. So you will see some improvement.

You want the have each HD on a separate channel and each CD drive on a separate channel. Only one device per channel can be read/written to at a time. So for CD to CD copying, this is great. You should then use the HD on the opposite channel to house the data that you will burn to a CD. Make sense?

Thanks peeps. I'll stick the card in over the weekend and try it out. Let's see how many IDE cables I can get in my case...