IDE Channel w/Raid questions (2 of them)

[Dan Michael]

1.  I currently have 3 IDE devices in my system, two HDD's and a zip drive. 
I'm acutely aware that placing the two HDD's in a master/slave setup on the
same cable will severely degrade performance.  However, will the zip drive
installed as slave on one of the channels with the HDD setup as the master
degrade my performance by it's very presence, or only when it is accessed in
parallel with the master drive?

2.  My current MB will not support my Promise ATA-66 card in Linux because
of a bios limitation.  I want to purchase a dual board to run my Promise
card on so that I can raid at ATA66 speeds.  (this would also solve my
problem in question one as I'd be able to offload the zip and put an ATAPI
cdrom on the mb's controller if I wished with no perfomance loss.)  Does
anyone know of a Dual P2/3 capable MB that works and plays well with the
Promise ATA-66 card?  Are there any pitfalls to running ATA66 w/raid or with
SMP?  Can I use the 2.2.14 kernel to do all of the above with the
appropriate patches etc?

I know these questions may seem slightly off topic here, I realize they are
secondary questions to actually installing raid.  I hope it is found
appropriate and innoffensive to everyone to post them here.  These questions
are just best answered by fellow Linux RAIDers who are both sympathetic to
my plight and also understand why I'm so persistent with pursuing the ATA66
issue for performance reasons!

In advance- thanks guys, as always you're my heros!

Dan Michael
aka NeuroShock

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