TR Forums

Right now I have a A7N8X standard, blah blah.

It has the 2 IDE ports

What I want to do it get a 36 giger sata drive to use as my main primary drive for windows and all my games and such and use my 120 gig ide for storage.

How would I go about this?

#1: Do I need to get an wire adapter or a sata pci card?

#2: If I get the PCI card can I use both the IDE on the mobo and the SATA on the card at the same time?

#3: Can I use the PCI card sata drive as my primary boot drive without problems?

#4: This is a good idea, correct?

Thanks in advance for any help and advice you give!!

If you get a native SATA drive then it should come with the cables so you would just need a SATA PCI card. With the BIOS for the card you should be able to set it to boot to that drive.

pez-king wrote:

Right now I have a A7N8X standard, blah blah.

It has the 2 IDE ports

What I want to do it get a 36 giger sata drive to use as my main primary drive for windows and all my games and such and use my 120 gig ide for storage.

How would I go about this?

#1: Do I need to get an wire adapter or a sata pci card?

PCI card.

#2: If I get the PCI card can I use both the IDE on the mobo and the SATA on the card at the same time?

Yes.

#3: Can I use the PCI card sata drive as my primary boot drive without problems?

Should work. Just set your BIOS to boot from the PCI card. (Depending on the BIOS, the boot option might actually be labeled as SCSI.)

#4: This is a good idea, correct?

Other than not being particularly cost effective in terms of $/GB, yes. If you're talking about getting that WD 10K RPM drive, it should boost system responsiveness considerably.

FWIW, my main rig currently boots from a Maxtor SATA drive conneted to a Promise PCI SATA controller.

Alright thanks!!

I'll check around for possibilities on drives and such now that I know it can be done.

Would you reccommend the promise card you have?

pez-king wrote:

Alright thanks!!

I'll check around for possibilities on drives and such now that I know it can be done.

Would you reccommend the promise card you have?

I haven't had any problems with it. So far, I've only used it only with Maxtor drives. IIRC there were some compatibility issues early on between certain SATA chipsets and certain brands of drives... I think the controller and drive vendors have got that ironed out now though.