Hard Drive questions

  • Thread starter Thread starter The Old Timer
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The Old Timer

I'm told that drives often now come in both serial & parallel versions. Is
there plugs that allow you to use either if your motherboard supports both
or if you wished to use the older sort with a new motherboard? Do newer
motherboards usually support using both sort of drives at once & is there
any problem in doing so?
 
Newer motherboards usually support both types of drives. I don't know of
any adapters... yet.
 
Most newer Motherboards will have at least one ATA/IDE connector that
will allow you to connect two devices. Hard drive or cdrom, cdrw, dvd etc.
You can also get a PCI UltraATA card which should support four more devices.
But SATA
Drives are becoming much more common and you will find more connectors for
them on todays Motherboards.
 
The hard drive do not have both the SATA (serial) or PATA (parallel) on
together. You can both a SATA based hard drive or a PATA one.

Motherboards are still providing BOTH PATA and SATA connector so you can
mix/match hard drives.

There are convertors where you can convert one type of hard drive to
another. However, it is more affordable to "add" a hard drive to a PCI
slot. You can get PATA(parallel) PCI adapter or a SATA(serial) PCI adapter
for less money that the drive convertors. Also, the coresponding PCI hard
drive controllers "appear: to be more reliable than the drive "convertors".
 
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