Tech Support > Computer Hardware > SATA Drives
SATA Drives
Posted by Jamie on September 2nd, 2005


I was thinking of switching to SATA however I was wondering if it is
possible to still keep my PATA drives for storage and what not or would it
cause conflictions or would it not work at all. Or the best possible case
scenerio all would be fine. Thanks in advance.


Posted by Mike Walsh on September 2nd, 2005



You can mix SATA and PATA drives. You should be able to select which drive to boot from in the BIOS, although some have reported problems doing this.

Jamie wrote:
--
Mike Walsh
West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S.A.

Posted by Timothy Daniels on September 2nd, 2005


"Jamie" wrote:

There will be no conflicts (nor conflictions, for that matter)
if you have controllers for both SATA and PATA drives.
If you don't have a controller for one of them on your
motherboard, you can use an add-on PCI card with the
requisite controller on it. Take a look at SIIG's offerings
for SATA:
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=103&pid=467 ,
for PATA:
http://www.siig.com/product.asp?catid=103&pid=437

*TimDaniels*

Posted by Ian East on September 2nd, 2005


On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:01:30 GMT, "Jamie" <jamieivany@nf.sympatico.ca>
wrote:

SATA/PATA bridge to make your PATA drives work in a SATA system. Do a
search on e-bay for examples of what I'm talking about.

Posted by kony on September 2nd, 2005


On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 17:01:30 GMT, "Jamie"
<jamieivany@nf.sympatico.ca> wrote:

That will work fine, there is no conflict in merely using
both types of drives. The main issue is that if you're
transferring your windows installation, you'll need to have
it recognize this new drive as the OS source. The easy way
to do that is clone the old OS drive to the new, power
off/on the system with only the new drive for one boot
cycle, then reattach the old drive. Of course you'd also
reconfig the board bios to boot from the SATA before the
PATA and/or wipe the old PATA drive so the box doesn't then
start booting from the PATA drive again.


Posted by DaveW on September 3rd, 2005


IF your motherboard has provisions for both SATA and PATA harddrives then
you should have no problems mixing them.

--
DaveW
"Jamie" <jamieivany@nf.sympatico.ca> wrote in message
news:Kz%Re.84070$Ph4.2658912@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...


Posted by Gerard Bok on September 3rd, 2005


On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 12:05:29 -0700, Ian East <ian.east@gmail>
wrote:

Recently, I read a magazine test of 5 bridges.
None (!!) of them performed flawless, only 1 proved to be more or
less usable.

Also: Take into account what it would cost (per gigabyte) to just
replace your PATA storage with new SATA.
New drives, new warranty periodes, seamless performance (no
PCI-bus bottleneck).

--
Kind regards,
Gerard Bok

Posted by kony on September 3rd, 2005


On Sat, 03 Sep 2005 10:46:10 GMT, bok118@zonnet.nl (Gerard
Bok) wrote:


No modern chipsets put the PATA controller on the PCI bus.
SATA is an evolutionary improvement that so far, offers very
little performance benefit because the drives use the same
technology beyond the bridge interface.

Posted by Gerard Bok on September 3rd, 2005


On Sat, 03 Sep 2005 12:40:14 GMT, kony <spam@spam.com> wrote:

True. But you cut the part of a 'SATA only motherboard'.

In order to connect legacy PATA drives to such a beast would
require either a bridge-board (which seems to be unreliable) or
an interface card. Which in turn would connect to the PCI in most
cases. (I haven't seen any PCIx to EIDA / PATA yet :-)

I must also add a correction to my earlier statement. The
magazine (dutch edition of C'T, september issue) tested 4
different bridge boards, not 5.

--
Kind regards,
Gerard Bok


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