Drive setup - Mixing P and SATA

At the moment I have an 80GB, 8MB Maxtor Diamond Max as my primary master.
On the secondary channel are a CD-RW/DVD-ROM and a CD-RW.

I've read on here that big HD's are more prone to failures.
I was going to purchase a 160GB Maxtor of the style above, but after discovering this fact, I am considering other options.

I have 2 SATA connectors on my mobo.
Could I buy 2 x 80GB SATA of the above drive and use them in conjunction with my existing setup?
The extra space is just for storage of my vast record and CD collection and probably a partitiion for games.

So, is it possible to mix P and SATA?
Would the 160GB version be fine if it was just for storage, not an OS drive?
What's the deal with the RAID config on this board? Will it thwart my plans?

Cheers for any help.

should work fine no problems. Ive got a hard drive for storage on my SATA channel, while my o/s disks are on the normal IDE.

Raid wont affect you even if you ise both SATA channels, you have to manually set up the array for it to do anything.

Gnarly!

And a 160GB drive wont be stressed enough in this situation?
Are there any brands of drive that are more reliable at this large size?