IDE drives and media data - we do a lot of this sort of thing - I ran into exactly the same issue at home - here's an email I wrote to my colleagues about it:

Comrades,

Petra asked me to write a little note re the cheaper Avid products and IDE drives.

Chris was integrating an ExpressDV machine last week with the intention of having the media drive (250gig IDE model) on the same IDE channel as the system drive. The BIOS on that machine would only allow for one DMA device on an IDE channel and so the media drive chugged away at 33Mbits per sec (shows up as a PIO device in the device manager). Performance with 25Mbits DV media was somewhat jerky!

Now I know it will often work (on motherboards that support multiple DMAs on the same IDE channel) but it isn't best practise to try and get away with it and since another IDE/PCI adaptor (ATA 133Mbits spec) from Lindy (including cables!) is only £19 to us it seems that is the best way to go.

If the motherboard of the machine in question has Serial ATA ("SATA") then an SATA drive as the media drive would avoid this problem. However, SATA drives are currently about £100 more expensive than the same sized IDE drive and so the Lindy solution still saves us a bit.

The Lindy part number is 70642 and there is a price break at three pieces. I have put three cards in Pete's cupboard in accounts,

Regards,