It's really annoying that, with all the advances in devices, data busses and memory technology, the 'standard PC' is still offered with only two IDE ports. Almost all posters on these forums has at least one IDE port configured in master/slave IDE port configuration.
As Eforster posted, your HD and CDRW devices should be on different IDE channels for recording from your HD. But then what about the data transfer efficiency when writing to CDRW device from CDROM?
The typical system I see on most posts has 2 HDs, CDROM and CDRW or other combination of 4 IDE devices - which makes a strong argument that a minimum of 4 discrete IDE ports should be provided on a modern 'standard PC'. This would allow the typical user to configure a minimum of 4 IDE ports with each device as a master on it's own discrete IDE port and eliminate the need for any master/slave configs.
Dual IDE port PCI cards are available from Promise and other makers to provide two additional IDE ports for about $35. I think it's one of the more valuable upgrade options for any PC with only 2 IDE ports.
Most of the current popularity of RAID motherboards is not due to any great rush of users to implement any RAID mode, but rather to use the 4 IDE ports provided on these boards for more efficient IDE device configuration.
Hope this hleps!