My current system is all SCSI, but I have mixed in the past when I couldn't afford all SCSI and wanted to make use of the existing IDE drive. You can have a SCSI drive as the boot drive AND an IDE as a secondary drive(s). All you need is a decent BIOS (like Phoenix, Award, American Megatrends etc) on a motherboard from a decent manufacturer that gives you an option for your boot order. Here you can choose the first device that the BIOS will look for to boot from, SCSI, IDE, floppy etc. The differences of the menus vary greatly between manufacturers, and even within manufacturers different boards, so the exact 'location' of this setting will vary tremendously - but it should be there in most, if not all, recent (and not so recent!) motherboards!
Dear Duncan
I agree with the point you make regarding ability to nominate which drive should be taken as your boot drive but have no experience of mixing IDE drives having always used SCSI drives though I see no reason why not. As regards VM or I thought more commonly called paging file, as long as you have a minimum of 12 Mb more than the installed ram you are in the clear.
My understanding has always been that ideally this should be on it's own dedicated drive and that's what we have always done, however there were problems getting PS to run unless there was a small amount of VM on the boot drive..no idea why!
Cheers
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