amdnova

The problems you are describing make me wonder about heat issues. Do you have any indication on the temperature inside the case? Assuming you are in the US, it's summer time and it's possible that your computer is running hotter than normal, and the power supply isn't performing quite like you would want it to. In addition to this comment, I recently added some cold cathode tubes to my computer and it caused my computer to blue screen even when sitting idle. I attempted to track down a way to add a second power supply to my system, but that was easier said than done. I eventually just went out and spent the money on a new power supply and the system has been rock solid ever since. My suggestion would be to save your self the time and bump your power supply up to 400W. And remember, your computer will only use as much power as it needs.

Spod, I'm a member of some other bbs's, and some of the people there have a tendency to be really rude to new members. I came to SR because the other bbs's don't necessarily talk about storage solutions. BBH, didn't realize that I should have mentioned my searching in my first search. My bad. Thanks for that link, it does help a bit in combination with ehurtley's response. Interesting reading nonetheless. Thanks for the help.

Well Frank, I thank you for your kind(?) answer. You know, I DID in fact use Google and I found a very similar response to yours on some generic website. Then I came up with this silly idea that maybe I would try the forums over at StorageReview to see if it had already been discussed. I did a search for "ATA100 AND ATA66" hoping to find a thread with both of those in it, but the three results did not shed light on my topic. So I figured, what the heck, I'll become a member, post my topic and see what the people here have to say. I'm sorry I didn't do things quite the way you wanted me to, but I guess with your 227 posts, you have every right to tell me what bridge I can jump off of.... ehurtley, thank you very much for the detailed answer. It was very helpful and I appreciate you taking the time to not berate me like other members here seem to find necessary....I guess that's what happens when you are a new member....

A bunch of my friends and I have been discussing the effects of putting an ATA66 drive on the same channel as an ATA100 drive. Will the ATA66 drive cause the ATA100 drive to slow down to ATA66 even when accessing only that drive? If so, does this also mean that putting an optical drive (CD-ROM or CD-RW) that is slower than the hard drive will slow the hard drive down?