Was wondering if I can hook up both SATA hard drives and IDE hard drives. MB has connections for both. If it can be done though should primary hdd be on the SATA and the backups on IDE? Already have 2 on the IDE cable, no more allowed there, but if I can use the SATA then I could have 4 hdds, two of each. Not looking to do RAID yet just wanted to know if this is at all possible. Thanks in advance.

No reason why you cant do that, just make sure that the SATA controller is set correctly, and the make sure that the boot order in the bios is set correctly also. You didn't say which drive you have the OS on ?? I would recommend that you install the SATA drives, reload the OS on one of them, and use the IDE drives as you back up. You should see a major improvement in system performance. Refer to your MOBO manual for bios configuration with sata controller when not using raid. You don't state which board you have, as some of them will take over the primary controller and run the SATA drives through that. If that is the case you will need to configure the SATA controller manually, through the bios. Hope that helps IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT

Thanks for the info. The board is MSI K7N2 Delta-ILSR. If that makes any difference to the info you gave me.

I will check th board setup spec and get back to you as soon as i can IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT

Also, forgot to ask, what should the jumper settings be for the hdd's on the IDE cable? Does one still need to be a master and one a slave, or both slave if the primary hdd with the OS will be on the SATA cable?

If you use the SATA drive as the master for the operating system you can configure the IDE as master on the end connector and slave on the middle connector. The main thing is that the bios boot order is set to SATA IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT

Sweet, thanks alot.