SATA and IDE in same machine?

Lovin_It

Just seen a great deal for a SATA drive (500GB for £90 inc) http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=530765

Question is, I already have an IDE drive (with my operating system on it) in the machine, I'd like to add this to it for extra storage, but will this be ok to act as a slave drive? The motherboard takes both IDE and SATA drives.

Any ideas?

superscaper

Yes, when I first bought my SATA drives I simply added them as an extra drive. But it is far better to use SATA for your OS and install windows on it.

movieman

Depends on the machine, but I have four IDE drives and one SATA in this machine and I'm going to add another SATA soon. I think some older motherboards just use IDE to SATA adapters rather than a real SATA controller, so you'd lose IDE channels if you installed SATA drives.

Lovin_It

Thanks SS - I assume it's just a master / slave jumper on the back?

I suspect my current drive is on "cable select" - do you think this'll do?

Thanks again.

BTW - do you find SATA noticeably quicker?

superscaper

Lovin_It wrote:

Thanks SS - I assume it's just a master / slave jumper on the back?

I suspect my current drive is on "cable select" - do you think this'll do?

Thanks again.

BTW - do you find SATA noticeably quicker?

Because it's on a different control system you can still have the SATA as master as well. In the boot sequence it will typically boot from your IDE drive and you would change it to boot from SCSI device for it to boot from your SATA drive. And yes the SATA is noticeably quicker and in my case much quieter as well.

movieman

There's no master/slave concept in SATA because every drive has a point-to-point connection to the motherboard and its own cable.

superscaper

movieman wrote:

There's no master/slave concept in SATA because every drive has a point-to-point connection to the motherboard and its own cable.

Good point (got carried away thinking about RAID and dominant drives for mirroring).