> 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