DVD-Writer Master IDE and Slave HDD as back up hdd will this work?

[Nixio]

So here is what I'm trying to do. I have a SATA HDD as my main drive and i want to have a slave IDE HDD with my DVD writer. Can I Hook it up so i have a 40 pin ribbon IDE cable to connected to my DVD writer as master and the HDD to the same cable as a slave for a backup drive? The reason i want the DVD writer as master is so i don't slow down the performance of the DVD Writer. Or will this cause problems and burn out one of the drives?

 

[InvalidError]

It does not matter which drive is the master or slave; performance should be the same.

In the old IDE standard, all master/slave did was select which device selection line the drive was connected to. In ATA33 and above, the 'master' also activates bus terminations to reduce reflections and because of that, the "master" should be whichever device is at the end of the ATA ribbon cable.