Sata And Ata?

[ShoobieRat]

Okay, most mobo's (at least newer ones) support both ATA, and SATA. For instance, the one MSI board I'm looking at now, has ATA support for 4 IDE devices, and a SATA connection for 2 master drives.

My question is: Is it possible (and has anyone had experience with this) to have 2 ATA HDDs and 2 SATA HDDs running on the same board?

Since I know next to nothing about SATA, I don't know how the system operates in concerns to the SATA interface. That's why I'm wondering if it is possible, and whether or not that will cause problems in the system. I know the ATA drives will be slower than the SATA drives, but since they are on seperate controllers, I don't know if there would be a bottleneck still, or if the system would run at all with both types of drives.

Please advise.

 

[c_ro11]

Yep, it would work no probleme. On my systeme I have 2 ATA and 1 SATA working like a charm.

 

[ShoobieRat]

So the ATA drives won't cause a system bottleneck with their slower speeds?

I mean, will I just experience slower access times on the ATAs vs the SATAs, or will I see an overall blend caused by the system reverting the speeds to the ATA level?

 

[koldapu]

no, because they're independent drives

 

[killians45]

depends. you boot to sata drive then say you have your games on the ata. you'll be using the bus for the ata and so will not have full benefit of sata tech, but you will still see some improvement just due to the fact of having the second drive. may want to play with setting your swap files on the second drive and see how much of a increase in performance there is. I'm not sure since the sata/ata configuration.

 

[ShoobieRat]

Hmm...

My thinking now is to take my two ATA drives (that are currently in my machine) and make them secondary storage devices in my new machine. Since my new mobo will support 2 SATA drives, and since I can get some high-capacity Seagate SATAs for cheap, I'll probably buy 2 big SATA drives for programs/games/os, and use the older ATA133s on the IDE string for my massive music collection, setup programs, zips, and other archive info. That should work good, don'tcha think?

 

[XT]

You have to set the ata drives to slave, and put them on indipendent channels. Drives are indipendent local media drives, so as long as you have no data crossing over from a ata drive to a sata drive there will be no bottleneck, and full speed of the satas will be engaged.