3 hard drives/2 IDE channels: Best way to do it?

[Draeger]

I have a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L motherboard.

My C: drive is a 40Gb Maxtor Diamondmax and has my OS, XP Pro on it.

I have another Maxtor 40Gb as my D drive.

I've just bought a Maxtor 120Gb drive and want to add that to my system.

My two optical drives are an LG DVD-R drive and a Memorex DVD drive. I dont need the Memorex DVD drive, so I wanted to remove it to free up another IDE channel for the new Maxtor.

At the moment, the two hard drives are on the same channel, IDE1.

The two optical drives are on IDE2.

Whats the best way with regards performance, to add in the new 120Gb drive, assuming I'm going to remove the unused Memorex optical drive?

I suppose I could remove the 40Gb D drive and replace it with the 120Gb, but I've got a load of stuff on there that I would need to back up and reinstall, including my Steam folder, so I'd rather just add the 120Gb and have 3 hard drives.

Cheers for any advice.

 

[Draeger]

Cheers.

I kinda thought about doing it like this:-

40Gb C: drive with XP installed as master on IDE1

40Gb D: drive to use for backup data and nothing else as slave on IDE1

DVDR optical drive as master on IDE 2

120Gb drive as slave on IDE2 for games, apps etc.

 

[Draeger]

Yeah, that makes sense.

All I have on the C: drive is XP, and a handful of apps, anti virus, firewall etc.

Going to shut down and fit the drive and see how things go.

Cheers.