Hey. I'm trying to do something and I don't know if it's possible or not, but I bought a new hard drive [SATA] and realized I have an older computer that only has IDE/ATA connectors. I bought an IDE-SATA adapter, but I guess that means I won't be able to have both hard drives hooked up at once, right? The older hard drive is an ATA-- is there any way to have both hard drives hooked up using the adapter? Or will I have to choose between the two?
Thanks!
2007-04-28 11:16:25 · 4 answers · asked by Salem D 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
If it is a IDE to SATA adapter then it should make the SATA drive look like a IDE drive.
You are allowed 2 IDE drives per channel, one must have the jumpers set to master the other set to slave.
Typically there are 2 IDE channels on the motherboard.
If you can not select master/slave on the adapter, then you could put the current hard file as master on channel 0 with the optical drive as slave, and then put your SATA drive+adapter on channel 1. Unless you have two optical drives.
You could always take the adapter back and get a SATA controller board. That would allow you take advantage of any extra speed from the SATA drive over the IDE bus and to add more SATA drives in the future.
2007-04-28 11:30:47 · answer #1 · answered by Simon T 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You need a ATA cable with 3 connectors (one for the MB and two for two HDs).
Your adapter should connect directly to your SATA drive and from there to the PATA cable.
There should be no problem with having a SATA and PATA drive on the same cable. If you look at the SATA spec, it actually uses the same protocol as the PATA with some modification.
This also depends on your adapter though. I do not know which one you have, but if it is suppose to directly connect to the MB you might be out of luck.
MOST MBs have more that one PATA connector on the MB. Usually it is referred to as IDE0, IDE1, etc. They can usually support two devices each with most MB coming with two IDE channels.
2007-04-28 11:34:13 · answer #2 · answered by Eric L 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
upgrade your motherboard to one that has SATA and IDE if you have a socket 775 CPU this is easy to do and is about as cheap an add-on SATA card. If you have an older intel or AMD based machine it might bo the time to upgrade to either socket 775 (intel) or socket AM2 (AMD) CPU. Right now Intel would be the way to go.
You can get a motherboard with SATA onboard here:
http://www.gamegiants.net/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=sata&categories_id=9&inc_subcat=1&page=1&sort=3a
2007-04-28 12:53:58 · answer #3 · answered by decker 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
i have a computer that has both ata and sata in it look in your bios settings and see if there is an option avalable for you
2007-04-28 11:20:44 · answer #4 · answered by rovedidit 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋