Damn...how many ANUS machines do we have so far? I want a head count!! lol
From what Jetoney found out from Asus I would hang the CDR/w off of the Secondary bus and put the audio data drive as slave on the primary.
Because of today's hard drive and IDE controller bandwidth it's not going to cause you any grief. An optical drive on with a hard drive will indeed slow it down considerably.
Unfortunately I dont have a document stepping you through building a PC. I dont know if I ever will either , no time these days. I'll see what I can do tho.
Otherwise rock on man! Let us know how it goes and read your Asus Manual!!!! That is the best guide for anyone! That's how I got started anyways!
Good luck
Opus

Correction!!
This statement came from Western Digital.

"From what Jetoney found out from Asus I would hang the CDR/w off of the Secondary bus and put the audio data drive as slave on the primary."

I still believe that the Opus method may be the best . Anyone care to test a little with HD config?
I was told HD Tach & I/O meter(Intel) are the best testing apps. I would, but I am in the middle of some mixing at the moment that will probably keep me busy for the next week.

This is a quote from a different member on another board. Any Comments?

"The best config I have found is this:

Primary Master - You system / boot hard drive with your OS
Primary Slave - A CDR burner

Secondary master - A big, fast data hard drive
Secondary Slave - Second CD-ROM or DVD drive, if you have one.

IDE controllers do not perform well reading & writeing at the same time. So it's a good idea to have the data drive seperate. Also this setup means that when you write data files to CDR from your data drive, or dupe CDs, you are not reading & writing on the same controller."

Well, that's the best way of you dont go for any raid or controller cards and also if you want to go with two optical drives.
From all the research I have been doing most all computer magazines, computer forums all say an optical drive does indeed slow down a hard drive considerably so it would not be wise to attach an optical drive on the same cable as your data drive.
As Jetoney found out that once the application is launched it really doesnt use the OS drive any more..just the OS uses it and so putting an optical drive on the same cable as your OS and App drive will be fine.
As I have been doing it now is to have my OS and App drive on my primary all by itself and putting a CDR/W on the secondary all by itself. Any audio data drives I put on the RAID or ATA controller card for true optimum performance.
Opus