>>I'm working on a box right now, adding a secondary hard drive. The way it was designed, the IDE cable to the primary drive is short with only one connector for a drive. There is another IDE cable running from the mother board to the CD drive that does have the second connector, and is positioned in the perfect place for the secondary drive. Will that work or do both hard drives need to be on the same cable?
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>To add to William's reply:
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>- make sure both cables are 80-wire (not the older 40-wire) ribbon cables. While many older optical drives will work with a 40-wire cable, all except the very oldest hard drives require an 80-wire cable. For the most reliable operation use 80-wire cables everywhere.
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>- your options are basically:
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>- Option A: run your 2 hard drives on 1 IDE channel, and the optical drive on the other
>- Option B: run 1 hard drive on one IDE channel, and the other HD and the optical drive on the other
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>I've had better luck with Option A. Potential problems with Option B:
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>- Some motherboards run all devices on a single IDE channel at the lowest speed of any of its attached devices. For example, if you have an ATA/133 HD and an ATA/66 CD-ROM on the same channel, it may force the HD access speed to be reduced to ATA/66. Optical drives tend to be slower than hard drives
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>- Sometimes when there is a problem with an optical drive (trouble burning a CD or DVD, or trying to load or read a newly inserted disc), an optical drive can "hang" the entire IDE channel. If there is also a hard drive on the same channel, it will be inaccessible, at least for the amount of time it takes for the optical drive to recover (if it ever does).
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>My current "best practice" is to put hard drives and optical drives on separate IDE channels.

I second this. I have actually experienced it.