HDD Question

Im running a Maxtor 160 GB on SATA channel 1

ON IDE 1 (Master) I have a smaller IDE Drive (7200) that i use for backups

ON IDE 2 (Master) I have a DVD/CDRW

question.. is the small drive on the IDE channel 1 gonna drag down the speed of my primary SATA drive? if so, should i connect this drive to SATA channel 2 (via an IDE/SATA converter) for better results?

is there a way of checking if the disks are running at optimal performance?

the nvidia nforce2 SPP/IGP ATA properties report Primary channel transfer mode as UDMA 6 - Ultra 133, Secondary Channel UDMA 2 - Ultra33 - are these related purely to the IDE channels ?

Well the SATA and IDE drive are on different interfaces so they won't slow each other down.

The UDMA modes do actually apply to SATA drives too, although they are implemented slightly differently (I think UDMA 6 represents 150MB/s rather than 133 for SATA.)

There are various disk speed checking programs out there - none of them ever seem to give me a score I'm looking for, lol.