Use the 2nd IDE card and drives attached to it for capturing and rendering. Leave your OS and applications on your motherboard drive. Do NOT slave the newer ATA 100 to the older ATA 66 otherwise with some drives it can reduce the speed of both to the slower drive. This is little advantage if any to putting your OS on a fast drive since most of the drivers are loaded at boot and if necessary get switched in and out of the paging file. Ditto for applications. Save the bigger, faster drives for more demanding tasks...like capturing and rendering...even editing.

I think it's better to capture/render onto a drive that doesn't contain the operating system. So I would use the slower controller for the operating system and the ATA100 separate one for doing your video editing and capturing. However, that said, either will be fast enough to do DV stuff so it's really not a big deal these days if you're using an IEEE 1394 connection.

Tom

You can put up to 4 hard drives on a single "controller", since most (all that I've seen) have 2 ports, and each port can have up to two drives. You do split bandwidth slightly between the two drives on the same port, but there is barely any hit for having two hard drives on the same controller, but different ports. A bigger issue is CD-ROM, burner, and DVD drives that don't operate at ATA66 and 100. Some older drives run in slower modes, and whatever the slowest drive is on a port, everything gets dragged down to that level. So a blazing ATA100 drive might get dragged through the mud by a slower CD-ROM drive.

So.

Put both the OS drive and the DV/apps drive on the offboard PCI slot ATA100 controller (one on each port), and attach your CD-ROMS on your motherboard controller, thereby not dragging down your hard drive speeds. Keep one device per port if you can, but don't be afraid to put two devices on the same port if they run at the same ATA speed, and certainly don't be afraid of putting them both on the same controller.

OK, what I didn't say is that I have 4 ATA100 80Go drives and 2 ATA66 20Go drives. All 7200rpm.

I have 2 IDE ports right on the board (66) and 2 more ATA100 IDE outputs on this PCI-IDE card.

What I was planning was:
- To store my footage on the 80Go drives (PCI-IDE card)...
- Put my OS (Win2K) on one 20Go drive and my programs on the other 20Go drive, both on th FIRST ata66 on-board port...
- Put both my cd-burner & dvd player on the SECOND ata66 on-board port...

Considering what I just read:

If I put my VV3 program on one of the 80Go drives (WITH my stored footage, let's say on a seperated partition) will it still be efficient? Will I get a noticeable gain?

The cd-rw and dvd player being on the same "line" on a different IDE port, will these slow down my system ?!?

What you are planning is just fine. You have the slower devices on the slower ports, and the slowest devices on the same port. All is well.

Actually there is no noticeable gain at all from putting your programs on a separate drive from the OS. The data on these drives will rarely be accessed during captures and rendering. It may make it a bit tidier for you when looking at it in windows explorer, but that's about it.