My new pc has:
250GB drive on SATA port 0
250GB drive on SATA port 1
DVDRW / CDRW Combo on SATA port 2

Would I be better off moving the second HD on to SATA port 3 or is the IO contention not an issue with SATA the same as it was with IDE ?

I'm guessing that since all the cables are single plug, and each has it's own cabel then they are all effectively master devices ?

Also even though I have disable the on board raid so as to get back 250GB of disk space, if I was to reanable it at some stage, do the two HDs need to be on adajacent ports eg 0 and 1 or 2 and 3 ??