[CentOS] parted - is there a problem

Everyone,

I recently added a 300gig Seagate sata drive on a Centos 5.0 and have a
couple of questions.

The drive was recognized with the device as /dev/sdc.  The system came
with some SCCI drives that are labeled as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.  I was
surprised that the sata drives used sdc.  Are the sata drives considered
more like SCCI or IDE drives?  

The real problem occurred when I tried to partition the drive with
parted.  I used he command mkpart to form one partition of 300 gigs
which created /dev/sdc1, and then after 'quiting' parted used mkfs.ext3
to create a file system. Everything went as expected with the ability to
mount the file system and copy files into it.  However, /dev/sdc1
disappeared when I rebooted.  After the reboot /dev/sdc1 was missing and
CentOs obviously could not recognize the partition.  The error is
probably related to my lack of experience with parted so I tried it 2
other times with the same results.

I finally gave up and used fdisk which  has worked without a problem. 

By way of observation I could not find a 'write to disk' command in
parted like what is present in fdisk.  Is there a problem with parted or
I am just lacking in knowledge of some of the parted commands.
Certainly could not find any write like statements in the man pages or
the info pages.

Are there others of you that use parted?  What did I do wrong?

Greg Ennis