I have a motherboard with two IDE channels, as do most motherboards. I also have two hard drives. The conventional setup of those hard drives would be to set one as a master, and to set the other as a slave, and then to daisy chain them off a single IDE channel.
But what I’m wondering is if you hook each of them up to their own IDE channels, will that improve the hard drive’s performance?
That way, the data is not “shared” through one cable. Or does it matter?
doesn’t matter, and it’s usually not done. the second in connector on the cable goes to port on your slave drive. If you set the second drive on the second controller, it needs to be set at master as well. either way, it will still work, but not worth the trouble really. If you want to improve the drives performance, perform a regularly scheduled disk-defrag or just add RAM. or both. 
have a nice day.
It would really make very little difference unless you were doing something really intensive on one channel, say burning a CD from a disk image on the primary master drive. In that scenario you might probably get slightly better performance running a program from a drive on the secondary master or slave channel while the primary was burning as it would not have to share the primary IRQ for IO with the busy drive. I imagine the difference would be small, however, especially on a fast system with DMA enabled.
Don’t you have the CDrom on the secondary channel?
It would be the same. Dunno about ATA66 drives, which use a ceramic connector, but Im sure you don’t have one of those.
sailor – This is an older computer with Windows 3.1 which was installed using floppies. There is no CD-ROM.
Well, I went ahead and just put them each on their own channels since one of the channels wasn’t going to be used. I don’t see any difference. But then again, they’re older hard drives, and the performance difference wouldn’t be visually noticeable. Anyway, thanks for all your input.