Upgrading the HDD from IDE to SATA

sudeep_mansh

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Hello,
My motherboard is Gigabyte 8S658GXM. I have a 80 GB Seagate IDE hard disk. I want to go for a SATA HDD. But my motherboard doesnt support SATA. I am planning to use SATA to IDE converter to use SATA HDD.
I want to know, is there any problem if i use the converter or whether it is recommended to use. If recommended i want to know what HDD 'type' it takes in BIOS, whether SATA or IDE. Also let me know can i use the HDD for booting the OS. or should i use it as a secondary disk.

Thank u..
 
My experience with these IDE-SATA adapters is pretty limited but certainly not great. Personally I'd recommend picking up a Molex-Dual SATA power adapters from eBay and then purchasing one of these SATA controller card | eBay or the like. The last time I used one of these SATA controller cards it didn't actually work, I remember Vista hanging on the boot screen, but I just probably bought a bad card or just a cheap one.

With regards to whether you should use your SATA drive for booting, the whole idea is SATA is that it is faster than IDE, so yes, you want to use a SATA HDD as your boot drive if you can. I'm not sure what "type" the BIOS would give your hard drive if running off a controller card, I'd imagine it would be SATA configured as IDE or Enhanced IDE (depending on how old your motherboard is) but I wouldn't worry about such things really, the speed difference between having a SATA HDD set as IDE, SATA or AHCI is barely noticeable unless you are constantly writing to the hard disk, that sort of stuff is more important when it comes to SSDs.
 
I've also had mixed experiences with the converters. Just buy a PCI adapter card if you want to keep the system around for a bit longer. It'll work far better than trying to use a bridge chip, as Vistakid suggested. I wouldn't use Ebay however.
 
Yeah I use Novatech, they've always been good with me. If you're in America you can use Newegg or TigerDirect.
 
Connecting a SATA drive to an IDE channel defeats the purpose of going to SATA, IMO. I would go the PCI card route to make the move to SATA have a purpose. Otherwise, you may as well just install another IDE drive.
 
Yeah I wouldnt even bother dude. it really does defeat the purpose of even getting a sata drive. I would just upgrade mobo's if i was you. In the long run, you will be much happier.
 
The problem is if you upgrade the motherboard, you also usually have to upgrade the CPU & RAM as well. The OP never specified that in their original post, so it wasn't a consideration. :p
 
I know. But in this case, it's pretty obvious that the OP has no intentions of upgrading the fundamental core of their system. I try to keep that in mind when I answer a question such as this one. If they're open to replacing the board and other components, that's another story. ;)
 
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