I have been told that when running to Hard disks to get max performance i should put the boot one with a cd rom on the first ide and my second (slave) on the second ide because if both HDD are on the same ide cable it shares the fsb speed or something. can anyone tell me if this is true

As I understand it, when two devices share an IDE channel, by way or primary and secondary device, the device contorller can only process one device signal at any one time. So if your two hard drives are on the first channel, only one will get accessed at a time. Also, to prevent buffer errors when copying CD-CD, some recommend having these on different channels. Personally, I would have HD(Boot)+CD on channel one, then 2ndHD+DVD on the second channel. I cant think of any occasion where I would want to access both hard-drives simultaneously, so you could in theory just stick both hard-drives on the first ide channel. Also with this array, I help avoid the buffer errors when copying. Each to his own i guess.

Not disagreeing, but what I heard (and I may be wrong, as usual), is the IDE bus defaults to the speed of the slowest item fitted.

Agreed HD on IDE0 or 1 (depends on how your mobo starts numbering them)

and ATAPI device on IDE1 (or 2, see above)

IDE cables are cheap btw.

PS FSB is more to do with memory and CPU than Hard Drives