IDE to SATA

rulocal · 30 Sep 2007 at 20:51

I am running out of space on my old WD Caviar 80Gb IDE drive in my old Socket 939 system. I am planning on getting a 500Gb drive (recommendations welcome) and am considering moving from IDE to SATA. Is it simply a case of plugging the new drive in using the SATA cables or will I need to change any settings? Also, can I expect any sort of performance boost from SATA?

Finally, I was considering retiring my current drive to external duties. Which enclosure would you recommend or am I better off getting a dedicated external drive?

Many thanks

rpstewart · 30 Sep 2007 at 21:14

Yeah, you can just chuck the SATA drive in and it'll work fine if you check a couple of things:
1) The boot order in the BIOS may change and need set back to boot off the IDE drive
2) The SATA drive will be blank so will need partitioned and formatted in the Disk Management utility.

You will notice that the SATA drive will be faster than your current disk but that's down to improvments in drive technology, the interface makes no difference to performance.

rulocal · 30 Sep 2007 at 22:12

rpstewart said:
Yeah, you can just chuck the SATA drive in and it'll work fine if you check a couple of things:
1) The boot order in the BIOS may change and need set back to boot off the IDE drive
2) The SATA drive will be blank so will need partitioned and formatted in the Disk Management utility.

You will notice that the SATA drive will be faster than your current disk but that's down to improvments in drive technology, the interface makes no difference to performance.

Cheers

Will I be able to install XP straight onto it and will the XP installation deal with the partitioning/formatting?

What is the benefit of SATA then?

rpstewart · 30 Sep 2007 at 22:35

rulocal said:
What is the benefit of SATA then?

In a desktop environment the list of benefits isn't huge, just smaller cables and easier setups (no master/slave jumpering etc) but importantly there are no disadvantages really.

In a server environment things like hot swapability and the ability to mix SATA and SAS (serial SCSI) on the same controller are very attractive.