Quick question regarding HDD and DVD drive

I recently junk-yarded an old computer of mine and came across 2 PATA DVD drives and a PATA HDD. I'm going to be building a new computer, but it unfortunately only has one IDE/PATA slot on the mobo, so I was wondering if it's possible to install one of the DVD drives and the HDD using only that one slot. The HDD would be a slave (getting a bigger SATA to be the main drive), so I didn't know if I could use the same cable to connect them both (the cable has 3 connectors, one for the motherboard, a master and a slave). I'm assuming I can't, but I'd rather not have to get a $13 adapter for a drive that I'll rarely use anyways.

If you will rarely use it then just dont put it in. No you cant connect them both without some sort of an adapter.

So let me just verify here... you are trying to connect only 1 HDD and 1 DVD drive to a parallel IDE port? If so, that is definitely possible. The best approach to this is to set the jumpers on the HDD and the DVD to CS (Cable Select) and use an 80-pin IDE cable. Otherwise, you'll have to set one device to MS (Master) and the other to SL (Slave). Maybe I'm not understanding your question completely... but if it's what I think you're saying, this method is used in many computers. You'll also be able to connect your SATA HDD and most likely boot from it, leaving your PATA HDD as a storage spare.

Yea you can put them both on a IDE cable, just set one as master and one as slave. Then just hook up your Sata drive to Sata port 1. You might have to go into the bios and set the Sata to your boot drive.

You may have two devices on a PATA/IDE cable. The type of device makes no difference as long as the jumpers are set accordingly(master/slave) You may only have one device on an SATA. Typically the bios has some sort of priority setting for the IDE and SATA drives.