IDE to SATA adpaters and other questions

Hello there,

I am wondering what the best way to utilize my 3 hard drives are. I have:

One 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

and two (older) 40GB 7200 RPM 2MB cache IDE HDDs.

I have purchased 2 IDE to SATA adapters like this http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6812270236 to allow me to connect the 2 IDE drives to my motherboard via SATA ports since my one IDE port is reserved for my optical drive. If it helps to know what kind of motherboard I have, it's an ASUS P5Q Pro Turbo http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813131377

My questions are:

Does anybody have any experience with these sort of adapters? Do they work well?

Is there a better way to set up these HDDs for my use (OS and programs for the 500GB, storage for the 2 40GB's is what I'm planning)?

The 2 40GB drives are being have data on them already (being reused from my old system that went down)- should I offloa/backup that data before I install them in my new build? Gonig from XP to Windows 7.

You'd be better off spending $30 for a SATA optical drive and hooking up both PATA drives to the IDE port. However, if the adapters are allowing you to access the older drives, then you're fine...

Old IDE drives do not perform very well.

I would suggest the following:
1) Return the sata/ide converters.
2) Go ahead and install windows7 on your new 500gb sata drive.
Use your IDE cd/dvd to install windows.
3) Attach one of the ide drives to the second IDE attachment and copy all the data. It never hurts to have an extra backup, but it should not be needed.
4) uninstall the first ide drive and replace it with the second and repeat the process.
5) Keep the ide drives for a while, until you know everything is running well, but plan on crushing them. They really are not worth it.

For what it is worth, a good sata dvd burner costs only $25 and is a much cleaner install.