Here is my drive setup" Ide Pri master=hard drive, sec=hard rrive ide sec pri=hard drive, sec=dvd rw Question: can I keep this setup and add 2 additional sata drives in a non-raid setup Motherboard is Asus K8VSE Thanks. Jim

That setup is fine. If you want to 'fine tune', put the drives on separate channels that you copy/move data between the most. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

You can add SATA drives if the motherboard has SATA controllers, and I guess it has. Wether you use raid or not is your decision. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

You can use either of or or both of the VIA or Promise SATA pairs of SATA drive connectors on this mboard. The VIA ones are non-RAID. The Promise ones have RAID support but you don't have to use RAID with them, though that may not be clear in the directions in your manual. Each connector appears to support one SATA drive (on some mboards they may support two on each connector). If found this in the FAQ for this mboard: "VIA 8237/8237R South-bridge chipsets do not provide upward compatibility with SATA-II hard disk drives at 300 MB/s. These HDDs may not even be detected at POST. To install a SATA-II hard drive, users need to lock the drive at 150 MB/s data transfer rate by HDD jumper setting." In other words if you buy an SATA II drive, it must have a jumper on it that limits it to 150mbps and you must use it. Some SATA II models do not have the jumper (e.g. some Maxtor), some do (e.g. some Samsung).

Oops On some mboards there may be two connectors per SATA controller - 4 for the usual pair of controllers.

Don't be concerned with the 'limiting to 150 mb/s' thing. Hard drives these days don't come close to that speed. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

You can have up to 24 drives w/o any real issues (C-Z). You can probably get a hard drive assigned as A and/or B as far as I know. And you can map a share to a folder as opposed to a drive letter so it might also be possible to install a drive as a folder, but not that I've ever heard. Suffice it to say, you will run into many other problems (physical space, power requirements) before the number of drives becomes an issue in Windows. Michael J