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General discussion

Using SATA as slave, IDE as primary.

Jan 30, 2011 1:27AM PST

My current setup has an IDE HDD and no spare IDE slots on the mobo, could I use a SATA hard drive as a secondary (to store extra files and such)?

Additional: my CD/DVD drive uses SATA, could this be an issue?

Thanks!

Discussion is locked

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From any IDE port you can run two IDE drive assuming
Jan 30, 2011 2:17AM PST

you have a two-drive IDE Cable.

Exactly what PC do you have ?

VAPCMD

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You should not have any issue at all.
Jan 30, 2011 3:27PM PST

SATA will be run as sata. There are no such thing as primary or secondary or master/slave for SATA drives but it will require a sata controller/port. Can I assume your computer has that?

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Jan 31, 2011 1:04AM PST

Sorry, I've read up since then. I have a sata port on the motherboard, and currently an IDE as a main drive (os and such). I want to use a sata hard drive as a second hard drive for files. Would this be possible?

Thanks!

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Yes, that's quite possible
Jan 31, 2011 4:38AM PST

The only time I've seen this not be possible is on some older boards that had a specialty controller for RAID which had both IDE and SATA ports. On those boards, you could only use one type of drive at a time but you could still use two drives. You didn't mention your MB so it's a guess that, since your other SATA port works, a hard drive could be connected to an unused one and it should work fine. You didn't mention your OS which means you could run into a driver issue if you set the port to AHCI mode rather than to emulate IDE. Check your BIOS first to see if SATA is set to such as IDE compatibility. No driver is generally needed if the port is configured this way but OSs such as Windows XP will want a driver if the port is full SATA.

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Works for me . . .
Feb 1, 2011 8:16AM PST

OS on the IDE, slave on a SATA drive. Be sure you have the latest BIOS because an older machine had the SATA ports but no current BIOS to activate it.