IDE or SATA ?

[thomash85715]

Hi: Thought I had mobo trouble but new diagnosis is HDD failure. Instructions from repair tech are to replace with parallel IDE only; not serial which I think is same as SATA. What gives? Is there an upgrade adaptor card or plug to enable SATA drives on IDE computers? This is emachines t2042 from early 2003 with XP. Thank you. --Tom in AZ

 

[Fragrant Coit]

Those SATA / PCI cards work well for Storage, but are impossible to boot from unless your BIOS supports it - most don't.

Better off sticking with IDE.

 

[Rik]

Your crappy psu (power supply unit) probably wouldn't last long with sata.

E-machine psu's are the cheapest of the cheap in quality, you should replace it with a decent one before it dies and fries your mobo.

With a better psu you could add a sata raid card if you wanted to, it would be a little quicker, but, you would probably have to buy a windows cd as the e-machine one probably wont work with it.