Hard disk question & more

[RLT65]

Hi, I have a IBM 9.1GB 7200rpm hard disk. I am out of room, so I added another IBM 4.3GB as a slave to the 9.1GB disk. The 4.3 spins at 5400rpm and is not a UDMA2 (33M/sec.) It says PIO mode 4 (16.6M/sec.) at bios boot up. My question is, will the slower drive degrade the performance of the modern faster disk? So far, I cannot see any difference and when I run Winstone99 it is about the same score as before I added the extra hard disk.
Lastly, I have a 250w power supply & have 2 hard disks, 2 cd-roms, 2 floppy drives and an Abit BH6 M/B with a celeron 488 (o/c, am I overloading the 250w power supply?

Thank you, Rhonda

[otheos]

yes!
if either disk is NOT DMA capable then they will both use PIO mode (which is bad for DMA disks).

You don't lose performance only if both disks are DMA capable (33/66/100). Try moving it to the other IDE bus. Maybe one of your CDROMS is DMA capable. So put DMA drives on one BUS and non-DMA (PIO) drives on the other.