2 hardrives of different interfaces allowed to coexist?

[teoh at uicbert.eecs.uic.edu]

I have a seagate 80MB w/ MFM interface running at 28ms hardrive. But many
people have pointed out that there's hardly any room for a complete SVR4
package. So, I decided to add another faster drive (~15ms) but of different 
interface type.
 
Is it possible to allow 2 different types of hard disks in a pc UNIX
environment (using 2 different controllers)? If so, what are comments
on AT IDE vs ESDI drives?
 
Is it true to say that the AT IDE drive is dependent on AT architecture
machine? How machine independent is the ESDI drive outside the AT arena?
 
I was planning to use the slower 80MB as secondary drive for back up
purposes or storing files of lower priority, and leaving all the executables
in the faster drive. Will there be any substantial loss of performance w/
this configuration? Or, is it better just to have a faster hardrive.
 
All comments are welcome, your help is greatly appreciated.
 
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Hai-Chuan Teoh			    *     Email: teoh at uicbert.eecs.uic.edu
Univ of Illinois		    *       Tel: (312) 930-1942
Electrical Engr & Computer Sci      *
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