DVD / CDRW drive master slave situation

I'm finding that my DVD drive is very stuttery and basically useless - I'm
wondering if its been set up properly. The CD-ROM drive is master, but the
IDE cable goes into the DVD drive first (ie is closest to the motherboard
IDE controller). If the CD drive is master, is it going to the cd drive to
find the dvd drive to play the dvd first? Surely that's not efficient - but
then again, the cable is closer to the motherboard from the DVD drive...

So, I'm not clear on the way it works speed-wise. My graphics card
incidentally, is a Geforce MX440 and I have 512 ram with a 1800+xp athlon,
so my system should be able to play DVDs fine. Its the same with different
software.

Thanks for any clarification on the above problem.