Mixing IDE and SATA Drives

[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

 

[Arno Wagner]

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?

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

Arno

 

[David A. Flory]

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

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]

Thanks for the replies.

-- jim

 

[Rod Speed]

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.

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?

Nope. Can be a little fiddly with some motherboards, but other than that its fine.

Do I have to do anything special?

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?

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.