I have plans to probably buy an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard with a
Serial ATA hard drive and a pair of IDE optical drives. I know that the
SATA hard drive will hook into the first Serial ATA port on the motherboard,
but should the optical drives be plugged into the Primary or Secondary IDE
ports on the motherboard? Also, how will the BIOS sort this out? Sorry if
these questions sound silly at all, but this is my first time with Serial
ATA drives. Many thanks!

Since you seem to have 2 optical drives, you should have one drive set out
as master on IDE-1. Whether you put the other drive as master on IDE-2 or as
slave on IDE-1 is up to you. You won't notice any difference other than
having maybe less cables in your pc. As for Sata, it does not matter where
you connect your hard drive as there is no such thing as Master/Primary or
Secondary/slave when using SATA, just one device per cable. The important
thing is to tell the bios from which device to load windows from. The Bios
is not that smart to sort that out by itself.
Hope it helps


"NightSky 421" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>I have plans to probably buy an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard with a
>Serial ATA hard drive and a pair of IDE optical drives. I know that the
>SATA hard drive will hook into the first Serial ATA port on the
>motherboard, but should the optical drives be plugged into the Primary or
>Secondary IDE ports on the motherboard? Also, how will the BIOS sort this
>out? Sorry if these questions sound silly at all, but this is my first
>time with Serial ATA drives. Many thanks!
>
>

One optical drive should go on each of the Primary and Secondary IDE
channels for maximum speed. The SATA uses a different controller than the
IDE channels do, so the BIOS will have no problem sorting this all out.

--
DaveW

----------------
"NightSky 421" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>I have plans to probably buy an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard with a
>Serial ATA hard drive and a pair of IDE optical drives. I know that the
>SATA hard drive will hook into the first Serial ATA port on the
>motherboard, but should the optical drives be plugged into the Primary or
>Secondary IDE ports on the motherboard? Also, how will the BIOS sort this
>out? Sorry if these questions sound silly at all, but this is my first
>time with Serial ATA drives. Many thanks!
>
>

"NightSky 421" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:(E-Mail Removed)...
>I have plans to probably buy an Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard with a
>Serial ATA hard drive and a pair of IDE optical drives. I know that the
>SATA hard drive will hook into the first Serial ATA port on the
>motherboard, but should the optical drives be plugged into the Primary or
>Secondary IDE ports on the motherboard? Also, how will the BIOS sort this
>out? Sorry if these questions sound silly at all, but this is my first
>time with Serial ATA drives. Many thanks!
>
>
To boot from the serial drive all you have to do is set the bios to "OnChip
SATA Boot ROM Enabled". If you are using the onboard VIA SATA controller
that is all there is to it. If you want to use the onboard Promise SATA
controller you need to enable that in the bios and tell it if you want to
use RAID or not. Disable the Promise controller if you are not using it.
Optical drives should be placed one on the primary and one on the secondary
IDE controller for maximum performance. They should both be set to Master
in this configuration

I appreciate the feedback everyone, thanks again!