If you have more than one drive it will allow you to simply hold more information. (master + slave = total). I believe it also allows you to set up an array of RAID if you have the proper controller.
What are some problems with the primary slave drive?
The slave owners.
If you add an additional HD to your computer, the second drive becomes the slave drive because the computer must boot from the Master drive
You never have to buy gas. They have Zero Emissions. They are cheaper to drive. They have quieter engines.
The second drive.....
Well an optical drive is a cd/dvd disk drive. Slave means it is in the secondary position on an IDE cable. So a slave optical drive is a cd/dvd drive positioned secondary to a different device on a singular IDE cable.
The importance of having a master and a slave drive during processing is so that there is no mix up when programs are trying to identify the partition table. Instances of accidental data loss are reduced.
On the older style ATA drives, now called PATA or simply IDE, each drive chain had two positions for drives. One was called the Master, and the other the Slave drive. The drives performed in exactly the same manner, and the only difference most people would notice was that the Master drive was given a drive letter before the slave drive. In short, a Slave drive does everything a Master drive does.
Configure the hard drive as the master and the CD-ROM as the slave.
There are jumpers on the drive itself that can be configured to set it up as a master or a slave. Refer to your hard drive's documentation for the pins to use for these configurations.
We generally use the jumpers to set the disk drives as master or slave.
Primary Master Primary Slave Secondary Master Secondary Slave Primary or Secondary will depend on which cable are you using to connect the drive. Master or Slave will depend on the drive's jumper configuration.