In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I presume that your DVD drives are connected to the IDE port/s, since you got 2 IDE, it will support 4 IDE devices.

Only 1 internal drive, connected to SATA, the other 3 are external drives connected via USB.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

The Sata hard drive will connect to the sata ports, makes sense to be honest. The newer Sata 2 drives will work with the older Sata 1 boards, but at half the speed, some Satra 2 drives may need a jumper moved or be adjusted firmware wise by a boot CD. But most should be ok.

I posted earlier that although the internal drive is SATA II (3Gb/s), the motherboard only supports 1.5Mb/s SATA I. I've checked the BIOS and confirmed that the drive is SATA connected rather than IDE, the only IDE devices are the optical and floppy drives.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

As for drive, I am very fond of Hitachi drives now, they are reliable, or seems to be. my 250Gb is 3 years now with no problems, but saying that my old Maxtors are 5 years old and still works, but Maxtor is not Maxtor any more, they are seagate and to be honest I don't like Seagate.

Indeed, all mine are Maxtor and are doing just fine. My inclination at the moment is for WD.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

It seems strange that you already got a Sata 2 drive in your computer unless you replaced it your self.

Not me guv!, the drive was part of the original system in March 2007.