Wasn't that an old Depeche Mode song or something? Anyway... I need help with IDE devices.

In addition to upgrading the car player, I also got a bigger hard disk for my PC. Before the upgrade, my configuration was as follows:

IDE channel 1: 20gb hard disk master, 10gb hard disk slave.
IDE channel 2: 4gb hard disk master, DVD/CDRW slave.

I remove the 4gb and put the new 60gb in its place. It works, but any drive operations make the whole PC behave sluggishly (mouse movement hitches and skips), and it's reeeeeely slow for all operations. Disconnecting the DVD/CDRW and making the 60 gig drive all by itself on the secondary controller makes everything nice and fast.

For all I know, it could have been this way all along with that 4gb drive, too, I just didn't notice because I didn't put anything speed-critical on that drive.

Now, I always thought Conventional Wisdom was something like this (quoted from a web page about IDE troubleshooting):

Drive running too slow? Remember that with IDE the speed of the master governs the speed of the slave. If you buy a new fast hard disk and slave it to your old slow disk, you will have 2 slow disks. For this reason CD and DVD devices should always be slaved wherever possible, and hard disks should be masters.

which is exactly what I did. But it was still slow. Removing the CD slave sped it up.

I agree that one option would be to copy all the stuff from the 10gb slave and just get rid of it. But I want all the space I can get at this point.

So does anyone have any idea how I can get all three disk drives AND the DVD drive working properly, with only two IDE channels and without spending any more money? Is there some magic trick I can do to make the DVD play nice with a disk drive on the same cable?