Quick reality check before I buy please..

[EffBee]

Running Windows 2000.

I currently have 2 hard drives in my system.

The first is an ageing 40GB jobbie with a 15GB OS partition and 25GB music and photos partition. It has thrown up a bad sector recently.

The second is an 80GB Samsung jobbie with a 55Gb games partiton and a 25GB "backup" partition for disk images of the OS partition.

I have started to run out of space. New game Vanguard needs 20Gb (Twenty!!).

I don't want to go SATA with my current Mobo.

Current PATA hard drives are massively bigger than what I have now. I want to buy in something around 300GB to 400GB to replace my Games and Backup Partiton. I want to put my OS and Media partitons on the existing 80GB samsung. Then I will retire my trusty old 40 GB drive (With a 6" nail and a sledghammer!)

Are there any BIOS, OS or other issues on such big PATA hard drives on older systems? Existing "round" cables OK? Mobo is NF7-S upgraded to last but one BIOS.

Thanks in advance.

 

[EffBee]

The Mobo is a few years old now and SATA was quite new when the Mobo came out. When the NF7-S was new and "state of the art" people were having a lot of trouble getting the SATA controller and drivers to be stable. OS corrruptions were commonplace as I remember. It was an ongoing issue for months. I don't want to reopen those old wounds and prefer to take the easy option.

I have nothing against SATA now, and when I pass this PC down to my youngest lad later in the year will use SATA on my new rig, partly because the situation is now reversed and people building systems based on the E6600 mobos are sometimes reporting problems with the JMicron IDE controller tacked on for backwards compatibility with PATA.

EDIT: Yes, since my first post I've pretty much decided to buy a smaller cheaper new drive for the OS and media stuff as well, so that I can retain the older drives as a disaster recovery option for a few weeks after the upgrade.