I did a search and read through a lot of posts but it seems like everyone has a different situation. I did learn alot though I haven't built a PC since the Cyrix days !!

I'm buying components for a new build (Conroe, of course) and while thinking through the installation, i have a question about connecting a previous hard drive. In my current Dell PC, i added a secondary drive 160Gb Western Digital EIDE that holds all of my iTunes. It's less than a year old and that's all i use it for.

I bought a new hard drive Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB SATA that i want to be my main/primary/boot drive.

Are there too many compatability issues with SATA/EIDE to make it worthwhile? Or should i just buy another SATA hard drive and transfer all of my data over so i would have 2 SATA drives?

I also saw an EIDE to SATA converter cable? Is that a better option?

Thanks,

Time2Ride

Converters are never recommended by the manufactures and will void a warranty ( no that they'll ever find out) if they somehow they hear thats a part of you RAM reason.

What mobo are you planning to use, btw? IDE and SATA drive can co-exists, as long as the board you want to use current supports 1 or more IDE channel.

Thanks for the reply. I haven't made a final decision on mobo yet. I'm still waiting for Conroe availability 7/24/06 and then I will look at all the mobo choices. So, right now I'm pretty open. I'm watching NewEgg and Tiger Direct and they don't have many mobo choices for Conroe posted yet. I guess they don't want a bunch of pre-order questions.

A couple of options I have found are the Intel D975XBX Gigabyte and GA-G1975X boards. Both of these have SATA and EIDE connectors. (I plan to get a decent mobo probably spend around $200-$250 on it).

I guess my question came up because i saw a bunch of different posts with varying degrees of success integrating these drives. So, i was trying to find out if there is a "best practice" for getting these two types of drives to work together or if it was going to be a pain i'd just get two SATA drives.

Appreciate the help....Time2Ride

I have never had an issue running sata and ide drives together. What possible issue could there be? They will both show up in bios, make the sata the first drive, then when you install windows make sure you partition/format and install on the right drive. After that you will boot from that drive and Windows will assign a drive letter to the ide one....

If you're worried about wiping your music, or putting XP on the wrong drive, just add the IDE after you're up and running with XP on the SATA. No problem.

All mobos with both PATA and SATA controllers support PATA and SATA drives at the same time, no problems at all.

Thanks Waylander......one common item of confusion i read was which jumper setting to use on the EIDE drive. The confusion was because even though it's a second drive, you still need to set it to Master. At least that's what i was reading. Do you know if this is correct or not?

TG, good idea. Yea, i don't want to dump the tunes!

I think this may be the best way for me. Get the build up and running on XP, make sure all is good, do all of my updates, then add the EIDE. Sounds like a plan. Just need to figure out the jumper setting?

I have never had a problem and i have used several different drives in the past while. No SATA and PATA compatibility problems at all.

Thanks Dewey, do you remember your jumper setting on the IDE drive?

The first thing for everyone to do is get there terms correct before giving advice or opinions. The correct term is PATA not IDE. IDE refers to the controller integrated on the drive. PATA as well as SATA refers to the type of connection for the IDE controller.