Ok, before I get to my question, here's my before/after set-up:

Before:

Win2K
Celeron 533
512 MB RAM
1st IDE Cable: Maxtor 20 GB 7200 RPM ATA 33 (master) and 30 GB Quantam Fireball 7200 RPM ATA 66 (slave)
2nd IDE Cable: Plexwriter 8/4/32 only (master)


After:

Win2K
Celeron 533
512 MB RAM
1st IDE Cable: Maxtor 20 GB 7200 RPM ATA 33 (master) and 30 GB Quantam Fireball 7200 RPM ATA 66 (slave)
2nd IDE Cable: Western Digital 80 GB 7200 RPM Ultra 100 (master) and Plexwriter 8/4/32 (slave)



And even though all my drives are different ATA speeds, I think they are all running at 33, since I'm not using any controller cards and am using an old ABit BH6 mobo.

Now, FWIW, with the first set-up, I was ripping a cd in about 25 minutes or 2.5X. With the second set-up, I was ripping a cd in about 8 minutes or 9.8X. That seemed weird to me, since the only difference is that it's now a slave instead of a master. Anyway, after several rips with the new set-up, I tried for my first burn (using the lastest version of ExactAudioCopy). It seemed to be working, but when I got back there was an error message saying I had "ejected" the cd drive (not the cd, but the drive itself). It also showed my new HDD as being "ejected". When I rebooted, my new hard drive was there, but my cd drive was not. Where'd it go? What do I have to do to get it back?

Sounds like cabling trouble to me... Or perhaps a power management thing (trying to spin down drives that don't support power management)?

If you are ripping files from the CD(I assume this is the plexwriter) to the 80gig drive, then this may account for the increased time. Ideally, you don't want to have the source and destination devices on the same IDE channel. In your situation, I would replace either the 20 or 30GB drives with the 80. This would move it to the primary IDE and increase data transfer speed. Alternatively, you could add another IDE controller card.

Peter

Sounds like Power Management to me too, but it shouldn't be kicking in when things are in action like that... Try your control panle / power management and set it to "always on" and give it a shot for a round or two?

Also, a good place to search, or maybe even post, a question like this one is http://forums.anandtech.com .