Mixing SATA and IDE

[Sourdough35]

I have an IDE 60 gig drive and a 120 gig IDE drive. I'm wondering if i replace one with an SATA drive if they'll both still work. Can you have IDE and SATA running at once in a non-raid setup?

Also, is there even a noticeable performance jump from 100 mbps to 150? Is it worth the extra cash?

[SkyDog]

Good ol' parallel ATA (IDE) and SATA will work just fine together in a system.

You currently won't notice any speed difference because of the interface. Hard drives just generally aren't physically fast enough to keep either ATA-100/133 or SATA saturated.

[Sourdough35]

So then there's really no reason to bump up to SATA 150 from a 100 drive?

[SkyDog]

If you're planning to replace a PATA drive with an SATA one just for a speed increase, you're not really going to gain anything from the interface type alone.

Of course, that doesn't mean you can't get an increase from buying a faster drive. A fast drive like a Western Digital Raptor could give you a decent speed increase, but that's more a function of the drive's faster rotation speed than its interface.

[agello24]

which operating system do they both work together? i can't get them to work together in windows ME. i keep getting told that their are some drivers that are not 32 bit drivers. after resarting i loose both of my cd-rom drives, and my zip250 internal drive.

Good ol' parallel ATA (IDE) and SATA will work just fine together in a system.

You currently won't notice any speed difference because of the interface. Hard drives just generally aren't physically fast enough to keep either ATA-100/133 or SATA saturated.

[phelan1777]

I have a SATA drive and three Two IDE's, as well as that my board can support IDE in raid ontop of the other 1-4 IDE's, I am thinking about putting two 20GB WD CAvier drives just to see if I can do RAID as well.

But regarding the SATA-PATA/IDE compatibility, I use my WD Raptor SATA for games, and my SWAP file be it faster then the IDE, and have no problems.

I have XP Pro installed on my 40GB WD, and the SEAGATE is for work and school programs, and unitilities.

So I can be playin a game on one screen and doing work on my other monitor, and drives will not be affected for the most part, now if I had a DUAL core chip it would be even better.

Even when I defrag all my drives at the same time. Three internal and one external hehehehehehehe.

I use VOPTXP for defragging, works great.

[Nasty]

which operating system do they both work together? i can't get them to work together in windows ME. i keep getting told that their are some drivers that are not 32 bit drivers. after resarting i loose both of my cd-rom drives, and my zip250 internal drive.

Windows Me is limited to four ATAPI drives total. This means that if you use an SATA hard drive, you must disable one of the regular PATA ports in the BIOS. And if you're using three or more PATA drives, then you cannot use any SATA drives. (That's because you're already maxed out in ATAPI drive support if you have both PATA ports enabled, and enabling even one SATA port with both PATA ports enabled will exceed the maximum support in Windows Me.)

If you want to use your SATA hard drive in Windows Me, then you will have to lose at least one of your optical/Zip drives. (Unless you use a separate PCI controller card for your SATA hard drive.)

The only Windows operating systems which fully support both your SATA and PATA ports are Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Advanced Server. However, getting Windows 2000 to work with more than four ATAPI drives is still rather difficult, requiring manual registry tweaks.

[agello24]

i be damn! that is the answer i've been looking for!! now i know!! i knew someone would have the answer!!! but here is a new problem!! when installed win me only on the sata drive without the pata connected, i was still told that their was a child device installed. and i still lost the cd-rom drives and the sata drives were in dos mode driver!!

Windows Me is limited to four ATAPI drives total. This means that if you use an SATA hard drive, you must disable one of the regular PATA ports in the BIOS. And if you're using three or more PATA drives, then you cannot use any SATA drives. (That's because you're already maxed out in ATAPI drive support if you have both PATA ports enabled, and enabling even one SATA port with both PATA ports enabled will exceed the maximum support in Windows Me.)

If you want to use your SATA hard drive in Windows Me, then you will have to lose at least one of your optical/Zip drives. (Unless you use a separate PCI controller card for your SATA hard drive.)

The only Windows operating systems which fully support both your SATA and PATA ports are Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 2003 Advanced Server. However, getting Windows 2000 to work with more than four ATAPI drives is still rather difficult, requiring manual registry tweaks.

[Nasty]

i be damn! that is the answer i've been looking for!! now i know!! i knew someone would have the answer!!! but here is a new problem!! when installed win me only on the sata drive without the pata connected, i was still told that their was a child device installed. and i still lost the cd-rom drives and the sata drives were in dos mode driver!!

Disconnecting the PATA devices alone is not enough to disable the PATA ports. Those ports must be disabled in the BIOS setup menu in order to prevent Windows Me from seeing them. Even after you disconnected the PATA devices, Windows Me still saw both of your mobo's PATA ports even with nothing connected to them.

In addition, you must install the nVidia or VIA chipset drivers (depending on your mobo's chipset) for Windows Me after that OS is up and running.

[agello24]

then that disables the cdrom drives too! so i would have to buy sata cd-rom drives! i only say this cause the MB is a chaintech skt600.
thanks for the really helpful info.

Disconnecting the PATA devices alone is not enough to disable the PATA ports. Those ports must be disabled in the BIOS setup menu in order to prevent Windows Me from seeing them. Even after you disconnected the PATA devices, Windows Me still saw both of your mobo's PATA ports even with nothing connected to them.

In addition, you must install the nVidia or VIA chipset drivers (depending on your mobo's chipset) for Windows Me after that OS is up and running.

[Koga]

I am building a new computer, primarily for video encoding. I have two WD Raptor 36GB harddrives I'm going to put in Raid 0, an older large sixed IDE harddrive, new AMD dual processor, etc.

Two questions:

1. I will put all my programs including video encoding in the Raid 0 set up but will also have a larger IDE storage hard drive. Will it matter to the encoding speed if the encloded video is saved to the slower IDE storage drive rather than the Raid 0 set up?

2. Does the video capture card matter when you are encoding video that is already on your computer (mpeg, avi, etc) as opposed to an external source such as TV or vhs? I have heard encoding is quicker if th evideo card has a build in mpeg converter but don't know if this matters for internal video. Thanks, Koga!

[Koga]

Bueller? Would like to set this up this weekend.

[tich]

Koga. Do NOT put your applications on the same drive as the encoded video (either the source or the transcoded output.

RAID0 will only be of use when using large video files, not for anything else. Do NOT out your OS, programs (and more importantly, settings, etc) on a different bus, or at least sit furthest sway as possible.

never ever ever use RAID0 for a boot partition.

Ideally, you want a small, fast drive to boot from, and hold applications.
Another, physically seperate drive to put the swap file on
Another phyisically seperate drive to hold source date (and maybe application cache, swap, etc)
Finally, a fourth (and 5th, 6th etc) drive, for the target data. Source data and output data should go onto two different drives, each on a different channel to the other. Reading-transcoding/editing-writing video to/fromthe same job incurs a performance penalty. Always use different drives n different channels for these data files.

[Koga]

Thanks tich. Helpful point on putting source, swap and target on different drives - makes sense.

Still a bit confused on why not to use Raid 0 for boot drive - I thought that you wanted to put your OS and apps on the fastest possible hardrive configuration in your system (Raid 0 raptors for me) and use other drives for storage, including source and target when encoding. - Koga!

[Nick_B]

Thanks tich. Helpful point on putting source, swap and target on different drives - makes sense.

Still a bit confused on why not to use Raid 0 for boot drive - I thought that you wanted to put your OS and apps on the fastest possible hardrive configuration in your system (Raid 0 raptors for me) and use other drives for storage, including source and target when encoding. - Koga!

It sort of depends on what you want. Do you want it to run all the time? Or run as fast as it possibly can, but only when it's running?

I've always liked RAID 1 on my system drives. It still gets a boost to read speed, write speed isn't important on a drive where data is not constantly being added and removed, and if a drive fails I can still use my computer.

Honestly, though, I've ran just about every conceivable level of RAID on my home PCs, and then I realized it's not worth the trouble, packed everything up, and have single harddrives just doing their thing.

Comes down to personal preference.