All cd-rom and cd-rw drives i know of are ata33 or less as even when transfering data at max speed the sustained rate is below 10MB/sec, way below the limitaitons of ata33.
most dvd drives also use ata33, allthough the pioneer 16x drives use ata66, even though the max transfer rates of a dvd drive are around 22MB/sec, still well below the ata33 limitation.
as for different speed drives, modern chipsets support independent device timing, allowing different speed devices to work at their own speeds on one cable.
this is also covered in the HDD FAQ.
occasionally problems arise when slaving optical drives to hard drives, but usually this isnt a problem.
<b><font color=blue>I prefer to blend into the background, because it's much easier to sneak up on people and disembowel them that way. Arr!</b></font color=blue>