question about ATA SATA compatability

ives · 31 Jul 2006 at 11:40

Hi,

A friend has a Dell computer and asked me to put in a 2nd HDD.
The one that came with the Dell is a SATA drive and the one she bought as a storage drive is an ATA.

Will this cause a problem?
Is there anything I should know about installing a ATA drive with an already existing SATA drive as primary?

many thanks,
Ives

XtAsY · 31 Jul 2006 at 12:03

All you need to do mate is plug the new ATA drive into a spare IDE port on the motherboard. The SATA drive is already configured as the bootable drive so there will be no problems there at all.

ives · 31 Jul 2006 at 12:57

thanks dude...that's what I thought.

Cheers!!!!!

SiriusB · 31 Jul 2006 at 14:03

XtAsY said:
All you need to do mate is plug the new ATA drive into a spare IDE port on the motherboard. The SATA drive is already configured as the bootable drive so there will be no problems there at all.

Not always true. Sometimes when the BIOS finds an IDE drive it will give that higher priority over the SATA drive.

It doesn't always happen [happened to me :rolleyes:

] and if it does all you need to do is change the boot priority in the BIOS. Take you 2 mins.

SiriusB