Stretch: I'm on the edge of my knowledge here, but I think I'm right in saying that it's possible to set up two hard drives both as masters, if your motherboard will support it (I think most do) which - I think - will give better performance, as each will have its own IDE channel. I think the implication of that would be that your optical drives would be set up as slaves. Double check with someone else, though. My system is set up with both the 40GB OS/app drive and the 80GB capture drive as master/slave, though, on the same IDE channel and it works fine.

The answer to your second question, AFAIK, is that it involves all three: I'd guess that, to copy a file that is larger than your available memory space (i.e. >1GB) will involve using virtual memory on the hard drive(s) - unless the app writes in chunks that are no larger than the size of your memory, which I don't think they do - and ain't nuthin' happens on a PC without the processor...

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