Sata as 2nd hdd with ide as 1st?

[Row1]

hello- my father needs more hard disk space on his comp for storing digital photography and desktop publishing material.

his main/only hard drive is ide.

i need to see if his fairly new computer (several months old) can run SATA, but if it can:

would it be easier to add a 2nd drive as a sata? or is it easier to add a slave ide disk?

to me, it seems like it would be easier to add sata: just plug it in and format it. no need to arrange jumpers and no need to figure out how to get data cable neatly plugged into two drives.

typically does bios look for an ide drive as boot, or would it look to the sata first (i guess it doesn't matter; it won't find boot files on sata and would progress to ide).

 

[IronDuke]

SATA can be problematical, do a search here and see how many hits you get. It works fine for though.
It will only look to boot from SATA if told to.

 

[Sharam]

would it be easier to add a 2nd drive as a sata? or is it easier to add a slave ide disk?

to me, it seems like it would be easier to add sata: just plug it in and format it. no need to arrange jumpers and no need to figure out how to get data cable neatly plugged into two drives.

It would be somewhat easier but SATA would perform better and are at times cheaper. If you don’t have the power connector and need to use adapters and such, it might be easier to add an IDE Slave to the Primary controller.

typically does bios look for an ide drive as boot, or would it look to the sata first (i guess it doesn't matter; it won't find boot files on sata and would progress to ide).

BIOS look for bootable devices the way you set it up. And you are correct, if it is set to "try other boot devices" or the device is on the list and selected, it will look for and find it.

Best thing is to get a SATA drive, clone it using Ghost, then boot with the SATA drive, after everything seems OK and you are sure that important Data is backed up, you can format the IDE and use it for storage, this is if you are concerned with overall performance and want to increase it a lilbit and are willing!

 

[Row1]

success! with ide slave

hello- thanks for input. i found a good deal on a seagate 160gb ide. i got it installed last nite in my father's computer. his primary drive is a 10gb drive, that was nearly full - so full it kept messing stuff up.

the install went fine.

now, once he gets his data over to the new drive, i will have to coach him thru a "scandisc" and a defragmentation.

on my comp, i have a sata drive, and have gotten used to it - it was annoying to work on my dad's comp with two of those wide 80-pin cables (hd and cd-rom) jammed up in the case.