Is that the blue colored IDE input on my motherboard? The other one is black, so I'm assuming I only have one 100 one.

Another thing. I have my harddrive (60 gig ATA-100) on the blue connector and my CDRW 48x16x48 on the black IDE connector. If I put both on the the blue connector, would there be a performance hit to burning or writing to the either of the disks if I'm reading from the other one? (i.e. Reading from hdd and writing to cdrw at 48x) The reason I'm wondering is because recently I decided to add a second (older) cdrom to my computer. I put it on with my CDRW on the black motherboard IDE. I also put an older 2.5 Gig HDD on the same (blue) IDE cable. I noticed a big performance hit. However I'm not sure which it was that slowed it down. My burning speed seemed a lot lower. Was this because I had a smaller, slower harddrive with the 60 gig hdd (my 2.5 gig was a swap, 60 was file stuffs), or was it because I had a second cdrom (it was older but still 56x) on with my burner? When I would put a disc into the older 56x cdrom, my mouse (at least in windows) would skip. If I wanted to read from both at the same time, I got a much slower speed in windows and linux.

Did both the older HDD and older CDROM slow my other drives on the same cables down, adding to a big performance hit? Or was it because the bandwidth on the cables was exceeded.

I want to pick up a 16x DVD reader but If it is going to slow down my computer like the other stuff did, I don't want it. Assuming the dvd-rom is ata100, and my blue motherboard IDE connector is for ATA, how should my drives be configured? (HDD with CDRW or DVD-ROM)

Thanks for helping me in my pusuit of knowledge....if you know a good website that explains this please tell me.

both the blue and black connector are able to offer ATA-100, but the blue one is your primary ide, and the black your secondary. On each ide channel there can be 2 devices, one is master and one slave. Primary master and primary slave share bandwidth, so do secondary master and slave. The devices can run with DMA (ATA) enabled or not (PIO mode), where PIO has lower performance (and uses more cpu power than DMA), so figure out which of your connected devices is not using DMA mode (try "hdparm"), that's probably the culprit