Parallel ATA Master/Slave Combination Requirements

You have two (primary and secondary) parallel ATA

channels on virtually all motherboards, letting you connect up to
four drives. Newer motherboards provide serial ATA, but typically
have ports only for two drives.
If you’re using parallel ATA and have only two hard disks, make each
one a master, putting one on each of the two IDE ports. If you have a
hard disk and a CD-ROM, make the hard disk the master on the primary
IDE port
and the CD-ROM the master on the secondary
port.
If
you
have two hard
disks and a CD-ROM, put both hard
disks on the
primary
port,
isolating the CD-ROM on the secondary
port.
The general
strategy is to group
faster devices together and away from
slower
ones.
The idea behind splitting two hard
drives (if that’s
all you’re
connecting)
is that it gives the operating system the option to deal
with
the two independently.