> sure.  why wouldn't it?  (I've had ATA hard drives and ATAPI CD roms on
> the same cable/bus since netbsd-1.4...)

It will of course :)

It is better for performance to have one hard disk on ide0 channel,
and the other on ide1. So each hard disk has its own controller.
This lets you, for example, do RAID 1 easily with not too bad performance.

If you put the two disks on the same controller, they have to share its
bandwidth and it will be very painful if you start moving data from one disk
to another on the same channel (unless you got plenty plenty ram but that
won't help that much).

It was advised to keep the CD-Rom burners separate of the hard-disks
on old machines, so the data to be burned would go from ide0/hard disk
to ide1/burner.

My own Shuttle is running NetBSD-current and has a 500 Gb hard disk
on its ide0 as master, nothing on slave. Second 500 Gb hard disk on ide1
as slave and the DVD/CD burner as master on ide2.

Works fine :)

-- 
unzip ; strip ; touch ; grep ; find ; finger ; mount ; fsck ; more ;
yes ; fsck ; umount ; sleep