What are master and slave options?

[Appzalien]

Actually Clockers first post is correct, the IDE cable is specific to the drives jumper. Master should be connected to the terminating end and slave to the middle connection. Its when using CS (cable select) that it doesn't matter but the Drive with the OS should be in the master position. And only accessing one drive at a time goes back to the 40wire ide ribbon, with 80wire ribbons both drives can be accessed at the same time.

The_Hunter, If you infact have your master jumpered drive in the middle and your slave jumpered drive at the end, maybe you should try correcting them and see if you get improved drive access speeds. Actually your luck your OS even boots, your Operating System must be on your slaved drive.

[The_Hunter]

nope have always had the slave at the end of the cable for many many years with no worries. the operating system is on the master drive which is first. bios always picks them up in the right order also, i always have the hard drives and the burners set to master and slave not cable select.

[lynx]

If you set the master and slave identifiers by jumper, then for identification purposes it does not matter where you place them on the cable.

The master drive always has the signal termination resistors enabled, so it should go at the end of the cable. However, with 40 wire cable and comparatively low speeds this didn't matter much.

That changes with high speed transfers over 80 wire cables, the master MUST go at the end of the cable or you can get signal degradation and data errors. The hardware is capable of detecting and correcting these errors (usually by retransmission) and the fault may not even be reported, but you will have slower data transfers.

The simplest way to set this up with 80 wire cable is to set all drives to CS (cable select), and always make sure that there is a drive at the end of the cable. Your boot drive doesn't even need to be the master in most cases these days, but it will avoid confusion if you organise it that way.