I would like to add a new hard drive to my computer and my motherboard has a couple of SATA hookups but no more IDE hookups. Can you have both IDE and SATA hard drives at the same time? I built this computer by myself but I do not have the SUPER computer knowledge this question requires. Hopefully someone here does.
Yes, as long as your BIOS supports it (and it should) you should have no problems hooking up some extra SATA drives in there.
I’m not a super expert, but I have seen mixed SATA and IDE on the same computer. If your motherboard has both kinds of connectors on it, there should be no problems at all.
Thanks. I figured as much, but it can’t hurt to ask.
You can buy an add in card that will add extra IDE and / or SATA ports to your computer.
How are the order of the drives determined? I’ve never worked with SATA before.
For IDE it would be the Primary Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Master, and Secondary Slave (determined by jumper settings and which cable). Where would SATA drives fit into that if a computer supports both?
There really is no “order” when it comes to SATA. The SATA ports are numbered and that determines the order in which you will see them in the BIOS screen, but the concept of Master/slave is simply not there. This was needed in IDE drives because two drives are essentially sharing the same communicaitons port.
My new computer at work only had SATA connections, so in order to get the stuff off my old drive, I bought an IDE card from newegg (this one, to be precise), popped it in, installed the drive out of my old box, and it has worked like a charm. Of course, I also needed to get some power adapters, because the power supply only had SATA-type power plugs available; make sure you’re covered there.
Anyway, yes, you have have SATA and IDE at the same time, because I’m doing it right now.
I had this problem as well. I built my new system and my new motherboard only had 2 SATAII slots and 1 IDE slot but I wanted to use an old 250G hard drive with it. I run my system HD and DVD burner as SATAII because it’s faster and the 250G is just extra storage.
Just make sure you have SATA support enabled in the BIOS and you should be fine.
To add to Kinthalis’ answer, you can choose which drive to boot from in your BIOS settings.
On a related note -
My SATA HD, which I boot from - is “H” according to windows XP.
I have one of those multi card readers plugged into a USB port - they and the CD drive take C - G.
Any idea(s) how to get my HD back to C? we’ve gotten used to it, but it bugs me that my primary HD isnt “C”.
(And I know it makes little difference in the long run).
Changing drive letters in XP is easy. The problem is that it’s rare for a program not to somewhere hard code a drive letter assignment in some configuration file or the registry so that after changing drive letters, it won’t run any more.
My advice would be to leave it be or reinstall XP with no drives connected but the boot drive. That’s the best way to be sure XP assigns it as drive C:.
rwhbyu will probably have to do this, because I’m guessing that the PC will try to boot off the SATA drive. (I had this happen, but the SATA drive had an OS on it. [OTOH, a new hard drive won’t be bootable, so the BIOS will probably skip over it and boot up normally.])