SATA DVD with an IDE hardrive?

johnmc

ASROCK 939 motherboard, "dual SATA". Windows XP Home.

I've been asked to fit a DVD rewriter to a PC which currently has 2 IDE hardrives and 2 IDE DVD recorders.

The new one is SATA (he didn't listen! and is reluctant to buy a new SATA hardrive). The MB has the standard IDE connectors plus one red and two black SATA sockets.

Is it possible?

I'm guessing that the red one is the primary and the black are secondary (thus the new one into black?)?

So does that mean only 3 drives as opposed to 4 under IDE?

tkwan196

not quite sure what you're asking here...is what possible? adding a SATA DVD to this configuration? then, yes. but for SATA there is no primary and secondary, the red port is mainly used for eSATA.

totalsolutions

Just add the SATA to the black port. There are no Primary/Secondary ports in SATA.
The power plug is required but some have dual power inputs and molex adaptors are available too.

Nilrem

Depending on the motherboard he should be able to use an SATA DVD writer on the motherboard - however it cannot be guaranteed without knowing the motherboard model as IIRC some SATA controllers can only work with hard drives (there are slightly different "instructions" for DVD's compared to hard drives, and some controllers are cheap so despite the fact that they have the same physical connection they may not work).

There aren't primary/secondary with SATA, as they are single channel controllers, however the Red might be HDD only whilst the Black can be DVD or HDD (my motherboard has about 10 SATA ports, several of which have limits such as non boot drives and are a different colour to denote it).

It shouldn't affect the drives already in there regardless, so you should be able to have all 4 IDE connections in use, as well as a combination of the SATA ones if you wish

At worst if you connect the drive up it won't work, but it shouldn't damage it or the motherboard or DVD drive if the motherboard's SATA controller doesn't work with optical drives.

So give it a go, it'll probably work but even if the SATA connectors are for a cheap controller that doesn't support optical drives it won't hurt.

basmic

The only Socket 939 Asrock motherboards with 2x black SATA and 1x connectors I can see are these:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=939Dual-VSTA
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=939Dual-SATA2

Both manuals state:

Serial ATA Connectors (Black)
These two Serial ATA (SATA) devices. The current SATA interface allows up to 1.5 Gb/s data transfer rate.

Serial ATA II Connector (Red)
This Serial ATA II (SATA II) connector supports SATA data cables for internal storage devices. The current SATAII interface allows up to 3.0 Gb/s data transfer rate.

JasX

yup, no problem mixing SATA and IDE, SATA is much faster and he should hook it up to the fastest socket he has available (tho generally you'd put your main hard drive on the fastest one if he only has one)

Your friend did the right thing getting a SATA drive, IDE is slow and practically obsolete these days (and seems to be more expensive to boot)

johnmc

Thanks everyone.

I would have been happier with a straight swap but now feel more comfortable following your helpful advise.