Hello. I just upgraded my mobo to an Abit NF7-S today. This mobo has both IDE and SATA and it came with a connector converter to connect ONE IDE device to sata. On my previous mobo, I had 2 IDE harddrives (both MAXTOR DiamondMax 7200 160GB) connected to IDE0 and A dvd-drive connected to IDE1. Two Questions: 1) Should I connect one drive to sata using the converter, connect the 2nd hard drive to IDE0 as master and have dvd-drive remain as master on IDE1? 2) If I do this, should I make my primary boot device the sata or keep it the IDE? Will I notice any boost in performance by doing so coming from the fact that 2 hard drives are not connected to one IDE cable (as i mentioned both hd's are IDE, Im just using the converter to connect to sata).

The limitation with two drives being on the same cable or "channel" prevents the read, write process from being efficient and effective. This being the case, because data from the two HDD's only has one cable and one channel to travel trough, making it a one way road for the read and write process. Think of it this way, when you are buring a Music CD, data has to be read from a drive and written to another, so two channels would be ideal for this situation, one channel is doing the reading while the other is doing the writting, infomation can be read and written simotaneously in a continous cricle.

"Should I connect one drive to sata using the converter, connect the 2nd hard drive to IDE0 as master and have dvd-drive remain as master on IDE1?" Yes. "If I do this, should I make my primary boot device the sata or keep it the IDE?" If windows is on the HDD that will be hooked to your SATA connector then yes set the bios option to SATA boot. "Will I notice any boost in performance" If you do notice a performance boost it will be very minimal. Have the lambs stopped crying Clarice?