Well most desktop motherboards these days provide for 2 SATA devices and 2 emulated PATA devices. Though the emulated PATA devices will probably end up using PIO instead of DMA for transfers which is slow and processor intensive, so these are usually reserved for optical drives, which are slow.
Thanks, Ross, that certainly explains it. I wonder why the motherboard isn't labeled more clearly that not all SATA connectors are treated the same.
I would still have the 2 optical drives hda/hdb set for DMA transfer too as watching DVDs will be choppy and burning CDs/DVDs may be fraught with failures.
I'll keep that in mind.
Most cases this isn't needed, but if you want to view and access information on SATA/SAS/SCSI disks you can google for 'sdparm', but it isn't as user-friendly as hdparm and not all options are implemented for SATA drives as they support a limited SCSI command spec.
I'll check out sdparm.
Thanks again, Alfred