Advice/Opinions SSD and IDE HDD vs. Single SATA HDD

[Enginerd87]

I am debating my options for upgrading my boot/storage drives on my new build and wanted some opinions.
Currently I am running a 7200 rpm, 320GB IDE HDD as my lone drive. I have the OS on one partition and my programs/files on another.
This drive was reused from my old PC to save money as it was less than a year old. I am currently running windows XP SP3 (32bit) as my O.S. but I will be adding windows 7 in a dual boot configuration shortly.

I have two options at the moment for upgrading.

Option #1:
Keep the IDE HDD for storage/winXP and add a SSD (~60GB) for my Win7 boot drive along with some select programs
Add an SATA HDD as funds allow down the road.

Option #2:
Upgrade to a single 500GB SATA II Drive and ditch the IDE drive entirely or use for backup duty.
Add an SSD down the road as funds allow.

I have one question though, if I add an SSD or SATA drive and keep the IDE drive as well, will I be able to run the SSD/SATA in AHCI mode or will I have to keep the bios set as IDE for everything in order to keep my old drive happy? My motherboard has both SATA and a single IDE connector.

I am trying to keep the cost reasonable, as I still need to purchase my GPU, I am currently running on the integrated Radeon HD 4250 graphics. I plan to use this PC for both gaming and general use, and the wife will also be using it for photo editing/scrapbooking. I am leaning towards option two since it would be an improvement across the board, but I wanted to get some opinions and also hopefully get an answer to my question regarding the BIOS settings (AHCI vs IDE). Thanks everyone.

This is my current setup:

AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
Stock HS&F for now (Gaia or Hyper 212 coming soon)
MSI 880G-E45 (For now, was part of a microcenter combo deal, planning an upgrade soon, Added Heat Sinks already)
Kingston HyperX Blu 8GB (2x4GB) 1333MHz RAM
320GB 7200RPM IDE HDD (White Label Drive)
Samsung 22x DVD-RW (SATA)
Antec HCGS-620W PSU
Antec Three Hundred Case w/ 4 Fans
Planned: Radeon HD 6870

 

[geofelt]

A 60gb SSD would be excellent for windows and a couple of apps/games. It is 50x faster than a good sata drive for os type random i/o, and 2x faster for sequential.

The sata port mode should be set to ahci in the bios, not ide or raid. The ide drive will be on a separate ide controller chip, so no conflict.

Your motherboard has the capability of attaching ide drives, so you should have no problems using your 320gb ide drive for storage.

 

[deputycleric]

I had a similar issue earlier this evening.

Thanks partly to this thread, I was able to resolve it by setting the SATA port type to AHCI.

However, in my case, I also had to juggle the IDE connections around, since when the SSD was plugged into any SATA port, one of my two IDE drives became invisible to Ubuntu, though not to the BIOS.

It finally worked when I had one IDE drive on each of my two IDE controllers, and had swapped the boot priority in the BIOS.

Now all is up and running.

Thanks!