Guide to Installing IDE devices

The vast majority of hard drives sold today for PC computers are IDE or sometimes referred to as ATA drives. That is why we are going to discuss IDE drives.

IDE CHANNELS
Motherboard chipsets on today's motherboards support two channels or two connectors. Yes, there is new technology arriving on the scene that provides for four channels, but that is outside the scope of this discussion. So, the normal motherboard has two connectors, one for each channel that data moves through to the motherboard. Each of these channels supports two IDE hard drives, set one as Master and the other as Slave. I need to mention at this point that there exists other devices that will connect as IDE devices, such as Internal Zip drives and Internal CD Rom drives. These IDE devices are all configured the same as a hard drive. So for now we will concentrate on IDE hard drives. This is a diagram of a Master and Slave configuration on an IDE channel: