Need adapter to connect IDE drive to SATA port on mobo.

[Mr. LL]

I am building a new PC and will use a 320 gb SATA drive for my boot device but I wanted to use my old IDE drive just for extra storage space and temporary backups. I have one IDE port on the mobo but I have two optical drives that will take it up.

I am looking at the following two adapters and have a few question if there is someone nice enough to answer them.

Newegg.com - Fieon Digital HYA203 IDE To SATA Converter - Retail

Newegg.com - Rosewill RC-204 IDE to SATA Mini Vertical Bridge (for IDE device) Model - Retail

Will these adapters work for IDE drive -- to SATA mobo?

Will there be any problems using a real SATA drive as my primary boot drive and a IDE with an adapter as a secondary drive, does SATA determine the primary drive depending on what port it is using (SATA 1, SATA 2, etc.)?

From what I can tell the adapter plugs right into the IDE drive, the problem is my drives are mounted width ways in the case instead of front to back, so there isn't any room to stick out, can I just plug a regular IDE cable into the drive and then into the adapter or will that cause problems? The Rosewell adapter looks like it will work fine but the other one I might have problems with, can't tell from the pic.

Thanks for any advice you can give.

 

[eyeCpc]

If you are not running two optical drives on a board seeing only one ide channel like more and more boards are now seeing slaving the ide model to the single optical drive installed or reversing the order to slave the optical to the ide HD should go easy enough without need for purchase of an adapter.

When mixing ide with sata drives note that the problem will be the need to unplug the ide drive if you need to reinstall Windows on the sata model at some point. The ide channel will override the sata with the Windows installer whether XP or Vista looking for the first drive to place boot files and other information there even while Windows goes onto the sata.

When determing which drive will be the boot or host drive will all boot information located there you set that as the first in the order of drives listed as well as seeing hard drive as the first item in the boot order. I run Vista on the single ide drive currently installed while XP sits on the first of two sata models the second being a storage drive.

When forgetting to unplug the Vista ide drive XP placed the boot information there while the first sata was set as the default boot device. oops! Time for booting with the Vista disk and performing a repair startup problems option. With the ide later unplugged the XP recovery console saw the "Fixboot" and "Fixmbr" commands restore the mbr on the first sata. Just one quick repair to show how the ide got in the way for the installer.

For adding in ide drives there are ide controller cards as well as those for sata. Generally those see use for RAID arrays made up of a pair of ide drives while still being able to run a single drive. The best option of course would be replacing the ide drive with a sata model and simply tranferring files to the new sata drive you set up as the primary storeage/backup device. The trend seen with most new boards is towards sata in general with sata optical drives available as well.

 

[Mr. LL]

Thanks for the info.

 

[eyeCpc]

There's quite a bit available now for getting around problems when wanting to throw an extra drive in. For the longest time it was seeing a sata type drive added in when no sata ports were seen. Then you add a controller card for that or a SCSI type for additional storage.

At this time you now sata type optical drives available for use on the newer boards. But one thing to note there is that they are still more or less limited by the ATA33 standard. Simply going from a single core cpu on one build to a good dual core model on the next is what actually saw the time saved for burning data dvd backups here.