Can SATA And PATA HDD Work In Conjunction? - Upgrading to SATA HDD

Hello all ! I need to increase my hard disktorage capacity and therefore have decided to go in for new HDD. I have an Intel D865 GBF mother-board and a P4-C running @ 2.4 GHz with Win XP as the primary OS. Currently I have one 40 GB HDD set as Primary Master, one 20 GB as Primary Slave, two optical drives ( DVD / CD writer ) as Secondary Master / Slave. I intend to remove one of the optical drives or if I find someone willing to take the 20 GB HDD, out it goes. Question1: Will a new SATA HDD function and co-exist with an existing PATA HDD ? Question2: Will I need to make any changes in the power supply? Question3: Will there be any difference in performance between a SATA and PATA HDD of the same capacity? TIA !

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1. The SATA drive would show up as a separate drive from the PATA (drive D or similar), as far as I know there is no way to RAID a PATA and a SATA drive together.

2. Hard to tell, as it depends on what you have, you might just have to try it and see, or remove an older drive to reduce the drain.

3. Although SATA is faster than PATA, the speed really probably depends more on the drives themselves. A slow SATA drive is still no faster than a slow PATA drive, SATA just has the capability to be faster.

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o to best buy and get a 160gig for 40 bucks, or whatever the ridiculously low price is. then sell your 2 old drives on ebay and make that 40 bucks back. you could get a sata, but then your dishing out a little more cash, and you wont notice a performance boost at all. no need to upgrade your psu if you toss those old drives out and get a single drive. plus, your computer will be quieter also. capacity doesnt have any affect on performance. just get drive from best buy. dont buy a used or white label drive online. spend the 10 bucks for a new drive.

 

 

 

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Hi sparx,


Yep, no probs. If you have the appropriate PATA & SATA controllers (either onboard or on PCI) it's just a matter of pluggin them all in. The OS sees them as normal drives .. except Linux which treats SATA drives as SCSI ones, but that's another matter!


Nope, often SATA drives have both the old Molex PATA style power connectors, along with the new thin SATA power ones too :-). Even if there's only the SATA ones, convertion is simple (either DIY or I think I've seen many dirt cheap convertors online) but that's probably not necessary at all anyway!


It depends on the drive's model (I've seen a review of a PATA drive beating out high-end SATA ones in certain benches!) wrt how the cache algorithms are defined & how much cache etc ... and also on the usage model wrt if it's a server then maybe the larger queue algorithms of SATA may be handy. For desktops, the NCQ queue algorithms may be handy in getting the right sequence of data off the disk in terms of what's closest to the head at the moment etc. It's best to check out & compare individual models. WD raptors are SATA only and are rated as the highest performing desktop drives ... but I don't have access to one so I couldn't say for sure ;-). Also, if depends on what you are going to do (video needs high bandwidth, whereas gaming often needs fast access times along with a reasonable amount of bandwidth, etc etc).

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2. Oh I see you mean power consumption, doh, sorry. Well you could always power it up with a cheap 2nd PSU or even an external one (I use a laptop-style PSU for my ext USB convertor etc!).

Also I forgot to mention that NCQ (& some other neat features) is NOT on all SATA drives, or even on SATAII drives, which don't even have to be at 300MB/s either `... there's a whole load of can-o-worms on this! I think anand or ace had a good explanation a few months back. Basically SATAII are a set of recommendations, not a standard or anything .. I think it is a new name for the working group too. SATA-300 etc basically states the speed, and the manuf's must state the features separately.

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