[sclug] Best drive arrangement?

[Neil Haughton]

I have a technical question - more hardware than Linux, so please humour 
me if this is considered off topic:

I have 2 HDDs and two optical drives (all internal IDE, and the optical 
drives are a DVD reader and a CD burner).

My current arrangement is to have one HDD (master) and one optical drive 
(slave) on each IDE channel, master on the cable end, slave on the 
middle connector.

I've been told that a better arrangement is to have the two HDDs as 
master/slave on one channel, and the two optical drives as master/slave 
on the other. The logic of this escapes me, but I'm not a hardware 
person and things are not always what they seem at face value.

So which is likely to be the superior arrangement (from the point of 
view of performance), and (less importantly) how can I test this using 
Linux (I am using Mandriva 2005LE)?

TIA

Neil