SATA and IDE, can anyone explain?

[GeForce]

Hi all,

Well the forum decided to delete my other thread by duplicating another one, very weird. In any case, here's my question again:

OK, so I'm looking at this mobo: Gigabyte K8NF-9 (NF4 chipset).

The mobo spec says it has:
4 x Serial ATA connector
2 x UDMA ATA 133/100/66 Bus Master IDE connectors

And my current IDE setup is as follows:
Primary IDE: Master: 160Gb HDD; Slave: empty
Secondary IDE: Master: DVD-RW; Slave: CD-RW

Basically, can I use my current IDE setup on that motherboard, and not use the SATA connections at all?

And while I'm throwing questions at you, can I run Windows XP Home Edition on a 64-bit processor (Athlon 3700+)?

Cheers again,

Jon

[congo]

Yes, you can, you can also use a RAID ARRAY to boost HDD performance to nearly double normal SATA speeds if you can set that up.

Yes to Q2 as well.

The fastest solution for HDD speed on these boards would a RAID striped array of some kind on WD Raptors.

Otherwise, a normal SATA, SATA2 or SATA with NCQ isn't really all that much faster than a fast ATA drive in real computing.

[GeForce]

Cheers! You've been a real help today, muchas thankas

Jon