Thanks RBL,
That is actually what I did - using the SSD for C, and the old (SATA) HD as mass extra storage. The gain in speed and responsiveness is truly astounding, even when used with IDE, not the even more effective AHCI. Out of curiosity I ran a check and the read speed jumped from about 120 to 350 MB/sec, and of course there is no seek and no seek latency.
My problem was that I could not clone my C HD to the SSD, thinking that the Samsung 830 SSD could be used only when the PC is set in the BIOS to AHCI, not to IDE.
A call to Samsung Tech support brought 2 pleasant surprises:
1. This SSD can be used also with IDE. - the problem was (as often!) with me, I did not reboot after formatting and initializing the SSD, doing so made the cloning as easy as with any HD.
2. The tech support person at Samsung was VERY knowledgeable and very helpful, spending quite a bit of time with me correcting the problem and explaining at length various aspects of using the SSD. Nice!
Eldad