SATA and PATA

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Rayne

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Can you mix them. Like have my PATA as my main C: drive and the SATA I am buying tomorrow as the slave?
 
SATA and PATA dont go on the same channel. Only when you have drives on the same channel you have to worry about master and slave. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure there is no slave-master configuring for SATA. And, yes you can use a SATA HD and a PATA HD on the same motherboard.
 
SATA can be either, the only difference is the IDE channel its on. Depending on your motherboard, you have Primary, Secondary, and possibly Third IDE channels, all corresponding to the different connectors. Generally the SATA will take the Primary channel, and if you have 4 SATA connectors and one or two PATA connectors, then the SATA will take both Primary and Secondary and the PATA will take the Third channel. The channel it's on doesn't make any difference on your performance, it only changes which channel your motherboard recognizes the device on. I myself have 4 SATA connectors and one PATA connector that supports two PATA devices, and I use two PATA devices. Therefore, my motherboard recognizes my devices both on the Third IDE channel, Third IDE Master and Third IDE Slave. My Primary and Secondary channels don't detect any devices because I don't use SATA.

In short, your PATA and your SATA will not be mixed as master and slave, but used on different IDE channels. This will not affect the performance of your system, just remember to set the hard drive that has windows on it to boot before your other hard drive in your BIOS.
 
Thanks for the advice guys. My PATA has windows on it so I make that the firstt boot device.
 
SATA is slightly faster so if it's possible you could re-install Windows on the SATA drive. I don't know if there would be a noticable increase in performance though, having never used it myself.
 
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