I was using IDE drives on x86 PCs from 1992 to around 2005. I never had any real problem configuring them. I probably used about 20 different drives across 10

I was using IDE drives on x86 PCs from 1992 to around 2005. I never had any real problem configuring them. I probably used about 20 different drives across 10 different machines. Put the master at the end of the cable and the slave in the middle. After the CS (Cable Select) jumpers and cables were popular it was even easier. SCSI was more of a pain because even though you could have 7 devices (the 8th being the controller card) it became unreliable with more than 4 drives. Sometimes I would try to add a 5th and stuff would get erratic. I also had problems when a SCSI tape drive was on the same channel as hard drives. We got 3 SCSI cards each with 2 channels for our Sun server. We put 4 drives on each channel except for one that had our 4 tape drives (QIC-something, 4mm, 8mm, DLT library)