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.