Sata & ide

[rhoff]

Going to buy a new computer and just wanted to know if its possible to have a sata hard drive and a slave ide hard drive in the same system along with a cdrom..... thanks in advance for any replies.

Ron

[chrisbliss18]

There isn't a problem in mixing SATA and IDE drives. You just need to configure your BIOS settings correctly so it boots from the drive you wish to use as the boot drive.

[nizzy1115]

There isn't a problem in mixing SATA and IDE drives. You just need to configure your BIOS settings correctly so it boots from the drive you wish to use as the boot drive.

Also make sure that you put the ide hard drive on a seperate channel than the cd drive. (All mobos that i know of have 2 ide channels). What i would do is install windows on the sata hd and not even put in the ide hd till your all set then set in in as a slave and things should work a bit nicer for you :)

[rhoff]

There isn't a problem in mixing SATA and IDE drives. You just need to configure your BIOS settings correctly so it boots from the drive you wish to use as the boot drive.

Thanks chris, wasn't quite sure how this would work

[rhoff]

Thanx, does this mean I could have 1 sata drive with os and 2 ide hds on primary ide and 2 cdrom/dvds on secondary ide without any problems???

[nizzy1115]

yup it does...actually that would be a smart thing to do and you would achieve better performance too. what i would do is stick the os on sata and then use one ide drive to install all your programs on and then use the other ide drive as a storage drive/backups. In my set up i have 2 rom drives on one channel and 2 ide drives on the other channel and i will be getting a sata drive soon to move my os to, so i will have a similar setup as you. Best of luck :)

[chrisbliss18]

Sorry nizzy1115, I disagree with you. To get maximum performance out of your harddrives, put your harddrives on different channels. When drives share a channel and both are being accessed at the same time, a data bottleneck is created that slows down the performance of both.

rhoff, since you are more likely to use a harddrive more often than an optical drive, have the harddrives and the optical drives share a channel. This way you get maximum channel throughput out of your harddrives at all times unless one of the optical drives on the channel is being used. In simpler terms, have each of your two IDE channels connect to a harddrive and an optical drive. In this configuration, it really doesn't matter which one is slave or master since you will not be booting from the IDE harddrives.

If you really aren't worried about getting the maximum potential throughput out of your drives, you can set them up however you'd like.

As a rule of thumb, always have drives that are likely to access eachother frequently on different channels. So if there are two drives that copy data back and forth between themselves, it is best to have them on separate channels. If you frequently burn data from a certain harddrive onto optical media, have that harddrive on a different channel than the optical drive that will be used to burn the data. Once again, this is recommended for maximum drive-to-drive throughput and is not necessary if you don't care about such things.

[nizzy1115]

well thats kindof waht i was saying...in my opinion, if you use 2 ide harddrives one for programs and one for storage and the sata for the os, your mainly only using the sata for the os and the ide with the program files on it, and you will only use the backup/storage drive when you are doing either a backup or storage, therefore you are always using 2 seperate channels. personally i dont think it is a good idea to put a rom drive and hard disk on the same ide channel...ever...

[rhoff]

Thanks to you both for your suggestions..... I know I'll use the sata drive for my os and probably any programs I install, the other 2 will probably be for storage of pictures and video clips, etc (and backup)...... am I right to assume that the sata drive is faster than ide???

[chrisbliss18]

The technical specs for SATA shows that it has a speed advantage over IDE, but the speed advantage for standard SATA vs ATA133 (the connection speed used by the fastest IDE drives) is very slight and wouldn't be noticed by most users. There is a newer SATA spec called SATA II that essentially doubles the throughput speed compared to the original SATA, but the motherboards with these connections and the drives that can fully utilize them are not very cheap.

So, yes, SATA is faster than IDE but not by much.

[rhoff]

Ok, then that answers all my questions, thanks again to both chris and nizzy...
Ron

[nizzy1115]

If you are really looking for a bit more speed out of a sata drive look into western digitals raptors (they spin faster at 10,000 rpm and are very fast) or look at the new maxtors with 16 mb cash. Tests have shown that the maxtors are as fast as a raptor or even beat them in some tests and they are much cheaper. Otherwise i think your pretty much set how you are right now.

[GrimJack]

Going to buy a new computer and just wanted to know if its possible to have a sata hard drive and a slave ide hard drive in the same system along with a cdrom..... thanks in advance for any replies.

Ron

All the answers were pretty good - just one quick caveat - Asus MBoards require that you use an IDE drive for OS (well, at least A8V-deluxe makes installing OS onto SATA drives quite the geek challenge) and much to my chagrin, you have to have a floppy drive too.

You did not mention what you were going to buy so I thought I would plop this into the pool.