Mixing IDE and SATA Drives

  • Thread starter Thread starter jim evans
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J

jim evans

It looks like I'm going to have to replace one of my two secondary
drives. All my drives are now IDE but it looks like my best price is
on an SATA drive. My motherboard supports both kinds of drives. Is
there a problem mixing these drives? Do I have to do anything
special? How will the system know the new SATA is a secondary drive?

-- jim
 
Previously jim evans said:
It looks like I'm going to have to replace one of my two secondary
drives. All my drives are now IDE but it looks like my best price is
on an SATA drive. My motherboard supports both kinds of drives. Is
there a problem mixing these drives? Do I have to do anything
special?
No.

How will the system know the new SATA is a secondary drive?
Click to expand...

Because you select the other as boot-drive in the BIOS.

Arno
 
jim said:
It looks like I'm going to have to replace one of my two secondary
drives. All my drives are now IDE but it looks like my best price is
on an SATA drive. My motherboard supports both kinds of drives. Is
there a problem mixing these drives? Do I have to do anything
special? How will the system know the new SATA is a secondary drive?

-- jim
Click to expand...

You shouldn't have any problem at all. Just make sure that the boot
order is correct in the BIOS. Windows should detect the new drive
automatically, as long as your SATA drivers are installed.
 
jim evans said:
It looks like I'm going to have to replace one of my two secondary
drives. All my drives are now IDE but it looks like my best price is
on an SATA drive. My motherboard supports both kinds of drives.
Click to expand...

SATA give you more future too. Quite a lot of the current motherboards
only have a single IDE connector and you normally want at least one
optical drive on that so IDE hard drive support is limited.
Is there a problem mixing these drives?
Click to expand...

Nope. Can be a little fiddly with some motherboards, but other than that its fine.
Do I have to do anything special?
Click to expand...

Normally not, tho with some motherboards, if you want to
have the bootable drive the SATA drive, its simpler to unplug
the IDE drives during the install and plug them in again later.
How will the system know the new SATA is a secondary drive?
Click to expand...

It scans for drives at boot time.

You may need to enable the SATA in the bios, some motherboards
have them off by default, just to speed up the boot.
 
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