mixing discs

[velusip]

Preparing for a linux install on a newer computer and I am curious of a few things regarding SATA discs. Keep in mind that I come from a time when mixing discs was nearly impossible without some fancy and unsupported hot swapping techniques. Partitioning seemed intuitive enough in the days of master/slave ATA IDE discs. You get a simple naming scheme: hd[channel][partition]. Do the SATA discs get numbered after those? Maybe with e, f, and so on? And if not, are they going to be recognized okay by modern distros? (I'm looking at CentOS, Studio64, Ubuntu Studio, and JAD as a final alternative.)

In the past I have used the following configuration with 3 ATA IDE connected discs:
hda0 recovery boot
hda1 /
hda2 /swap
hda3 /usr
hdb0 recovery boot
hdb1 /home
hdc0 /pub

I would like to replace hda with a high performance SATA disc. Raid is not wanted. What partitioning tool and boot loader am I looking for? Is it going to demand a RAID configuration?

Everything is backed up now so horribly breaking things is an option.

 

[velusip]

I completely forgot to mention the DVD drive is SATA! I'm just hoping they are plugged into appropriate slots and the numbering is reasonable. This way moving discs to another computer will also be easy.