Running an IDE HDD and SATA Hdd.

Spud21 · 6 Feb 2006 at 02:15

Just about to set about on an major overhaul of my main rig, to star ti'm just going to do the major components, Mobo, CPU, Meory, GFX. The rest will come at a later date.

As i'm not going to by changing my HDD for a while yet i'm will initially be using my 80gb Maxtor HDD, when i get myself a SATA Hdd will i be able to hae the two HDD's running hapily together ?

It's just i've got about 10 Gb of music on my Pc and there is no way in hell i'm going through the task of putting all my cd's on my pc again, so they will either stay on the IDE hard drive which will just become a secondary drive with my music on it, or it will be transfered across.

The mobo i will be getting is going to be the Asus A8n sli premium.

Thanks in advance.

semi-pro waster · 6 Feb 2006 at 10:28

That shouldn't prove to be any problem running a SATA drive and an IDE one however you do have the (usual) problem of getting your old IDE drive to work with the change of a motherboard so it may be necessary to do a Windows repair or possibly even reformat. Since your motherboard is Nforce4 based you ought not to need any SATA drivers which makes it a little simpler when you come to add the new drive.

Leporello · 6 Feb 2006 at 11:02

semi-pro-waster, you seem well informed on these matters. Can you tell me if I can clone my PATA based system to a SATA drive? Here are my details. Epox 9NPA+Ultra, Windows XP SP2 with SATA drivers previously loaded at F6 of the install. I was planning to use Acronis True Image 9 to do the clone from a 160GB Maxtor PATA to a Maxtor 250 Gb SATA.

Thanks for your attention.

semi-pro waster · 6 Feb 2006 at 11:17

Sorry I'm afraid that it isn't something that I have ever tried, all I can offer is that there is theoretically no reason why it shouldn't work given that you have installed the SATA drivers onto the PATA drive and the rest of your system is staying the same so no repair should be needed. If you have the time I guess you can at least try it and should it fail at least you have your existing IDE drive already working to fall back on