Older ide drive possible to use new mobo optical drive connection?
 

Can I plug my old hard drive with xp into the optical drive on a newer system which only has the newer style "smaller" connection? Or is there an adapter I can get? Would hooking up the hard drive in series with the optical drives cause problems or am i better off to disable the drives?

You can still use an IDE drive, if you want. Performance will hurt a bit, if both the IDE HD, and optical drive are working at the same time.