If a motherboard supports both IDE and SATA hard drives can you therefore run 8 HD's (4 SATA & 4 IDE) or do they all have to be the same type thus keeping the limit at 4 drives (without using an add-in card)?TIA

If you have the PSU to support it you can have 8 harddrives yes :)If you have 4 SATA connectors you can

Thanks P

Hi Vulcan, I don't think a general reply would/could be valid. It also depends a lot on the mainboard/chipset (or southbridge etc). The simplest way to install the OS is still on P-ATA drives. Some chipsets require more CPU time on the S-ATA interface, etc. etc. IMHO, only S-ATA-2 with real NCQ will have a clear advantage over P-ATA/S-ATA-1. Hope this adds to thoughts, good luck and kind regards Jaap

Well todays harddrives is not fast enough to fully make use of the U ATA 133 interface so in that sense there is no difference. I am not including SCSI drives because that is another interface those are of course quite a bit faster than even the WD Raptor.However SATA is more and more becoming the standard. They are good especially if you want to run up to 8 harddrives because they are hot swappable you can install them on the fly :). As for installing them on the nforce 3 150 chipsets for example you need a floppy drive or CD with SATA drivers however on the nforce 3 250 GB they fixed that so you don