Use a SATA & IDE HDD Drive together

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shravank30

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Apr 20, 2008
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Can i use a Seagate 250 GB Sata HDD together with a 40 GB IDE Seagate HDD without sacrificing speed of the SATA drive ?

I want to keep the 40 GB drive only for keeping backups of the important files on my main drive.

I will be using a GA 945GCMX or 946 GZM MOBO Intel E2160 Proc with 1 GB 667 Ram

Thanks
 
I was under the impression that if i am using SATA as my option for installing my main HDD, the 40 GB IDE HDD will not be recognised by the system.
Please advise if any special setting has to be done in the bios and HDD or a simple Master & slave configuration will serve my purpose and both the drives will be recognised by the system.

Thanks
 


There is only sacrificing speed when you backup files to your 40GB HDD from your 250GB SATA HDD.
Consider motherboard of Intel G31 / P31 chipset instead 945GC as it cost a very little difference but with significant improvement on performance.
 
As long as both hdds are recognized by the bios/system, they should both be seen. SATA drives do not have master/slave jumpers, so no worries there. The 40GB drive needs to be jumpered depending on other drives that might be on the same IDE channel. The only thing to really worry about is what drive the bios is set to boot from. Make sure its set to boot from the SATA drive and not the 40GB. As long as you've done this, you should be fine.
 
My system had a Maxtor 300G and a Western Digital 200G, both IDE. At one time, both were bootable when they were the primary drive in the system (the Maxtor was Windows XP and the WD was Windows 2000). As I upgraded, I moved the older drive to the "slave" position as a data drive. I didn't change anything on the old drive, and everything worked fine.

As long as I had this arrangement, there were no problems. However, when my primary drive ( the Maxtor) crashed, I replaced it with a new Seagate 500G SATA. I installed Windows XP on the SATA drive without a hitch, but when I later reinstalled the WD IDE drive, it came up with a dual-boot selection menu. Before I realized what was going on, it selected Windows 2000 and tried to boot. Problem is, I had deleted most of the Windows 2000 files, so the system hosed up.

Nothing I did, including removing the IDE drive would fix the problem, so I removed the IDE, reconfigured the BIOS, and reinstalled Windows XP.

I need the data from the WD, but I am afraid to reinstall it into the system, for fear of another "near-death" experience.

I am using a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000-G Rev 4 motherboard, and I do have the Seagate jumper set properly.

Any suggestions?
 
Many motherboards are set to boot from IDE drives when added. Put the IDE drive in (as a slave if possible) and press Del/F2 to get into the bios. In the bios, make sure that you are set to boot from the SATA drive. This SHOULD allow you to boot as you've always done, and get the data off the other drive.

If you are that worried about it, perhaps you can buy a USB enclosure. This way you can boot into windows, then plug in the drive. Copy off what you need, then you can format it/whatever you want.
 
Thanks for the reply. Once I got XP reinstalled and working properly, I reinstalled the IDE drive, and carefully verified the BIOS settings. There was a place where I could select boot order (HDD, CD/DVD, Floppy, etc.) but no place to specify the boot order of the individual hard drives. I made sure that the SATA drive was shown as a SATA drive, and not "translated" as an IDE. I set the IDE drive to "cable select" and plugged it into the last connector on the cable. Once I rebooted, the SATA drive booted properly, and the IDE is now my secondary drive.

It's still all magic to me, but it's working, so I am happy.
 
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