SATA interface with Dell Dimension 4700

Does anyone know anything about thee new SATA interface with motherboards? I'm pretty new to this technolog so be nice to me. With IDE here were two ports on the motherboard and both of those could split into two more, therefore, you could have four devices attached to your system. For example, 2 hard drives and 2 CD/DVD drives.
With the Dell Dimension 4700 it says there is 1 IDE and 1 SATA port. So, I can use the IDE and a double cable to hook up two CD/DVD drives. easy enough. Does anyone know how the SATA ports work? Can I get a double cable for that, too, to hook up 2 hard drives? Maybe are there 2 SATA ports on the motherboard?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Only one device per cable, and one cable per port. (

However, the 4700 mobo [i793121c7d9]does[/i793121c7d9] have two SATA ports, as shown below

http//support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4700/sm/techov2.jpg[" alt=""/img793121c7d9]

The speed is better with SATA than IDE, but SATA is still not totally commonplace like PCI-E.

What I'd recommend, if you don't have SATA devices, is to get IDE to SATA adapters that allow you to use IDE devices on the SATA ports, so that you can maximize the amount of IDE devices you want to add.

The drawback is that the Dell OEM case doesn't allow for much expansion, so your dreams may be reaching a bit....

Wow, that's incredible. Where did you find that picture? It's so hard to find out technical data from Dell, who assume the people buying the computers are totally illiterate.
I can't thank you enough, you've answered my question!

It's all in here

http//support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4700/sm/index.htm

If you use a SATA hard drive thats going to be considered the primary master, and if you want to set a cd rom you either have to set it as a secondary master or possibly a primary slave. I used to think it dosent take up the primary master but it does.