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Originally Posted by ratbastid
In other words, it'll only be an issue when you're actually USING the optical drive. It's not like the drive will just simply BE SLOWER because it's sharing an IDE line with the CD-ROM.
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Right, generally. Apologies for not being clear.
Ill-behaved drivers, packet writers, and status checkers exist that can cause the performance issues by polling the drive at intervals even if it isn't being played/accessed intentionally. Simply leaving a CD/DVD in the drive can be enough to cause it. If the light flickers intermittently assume something's being nosey.
This is one place where using analog audio playback is beneficial. Instead of tying up the IDE channel and some portion of your I/O system moving music bits, once the drive receives the play command it just continues with the analog cable passing signals directly to the audio hardware. Not that we use the things this way too often anymore...
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I'd put Linux on the 40gb unless you think you'll be using the CD a lot (frankly, after install, I almost never touch my CD drive). You could also partition the 200gb to have say 20gb for a ext3 partition for Linux and the rest a ntfs partition for file storage. 20gb ought to be an ample plenty, with the rest available for big file storage.
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Yep. Simplicity. If you get into performance tuning then you'll want to move parts to different spindles. That complicates things though, especially if you'll be reinstalling or moving drives around. Keep it simple until that's of interest.