I'm not sure I agree with this. I worked for a large west-coast computer store, in the early 2000s, selling and then later building custom PCs for walk-in cust

I'm not sure I agree with this. I worked for a large west-coast computer store, in the early 2000s, selling and then later building custom PCs for walk-in customers, as well as doing walk-in computer repairs on all manner of different systems of various vintage, and I don't recall having too many problems getting IDE master/slave configuration to work... as long as we had some spare jumpers lying around.