Add a SATA drive to an IDE only PC?

M

mixsit

Well-known member
I'm trying to keep an old PC DAW going by adding a SATA drive. The searches all seem to be aimed at attaching a SATA adapter and drive on to the IDE cable, but it looks like it has to be one drive, and the master.
But can you keep the existing C' drive and add a SATA second drive?
 
Hi,
I'm not sure you can adapt an IDE port to sata but, even if you could, it would eliminate the speed advantages that sata has.
Your best bet would be to look for a PCI-E Sata card if your PC has a spare PCI-E slot.
I think they make PCI ones too if that's all you have available.

Yes, you'd be able to add a secondary drive for storage without interfering with the existing system drive.

Hope that helps.
 
Ok that's a start. Yeah I'm not really looking at the speed', just being able to keep new drives in it IDE's are getting rare. This is a year 2000 (Jim Roseberry :) rig turned gen. purpose-rig so I'll have to check if it's even pci-e'.
Job one here is backing up and building a new C' drive. If need be I can go USB for the b/u at least.
 
mixsit said:
Ok that's a start. Yeah I'm not really looking at the speed', just being able to keep new drives in it IDE's are getting rare. This is a year 2000 (Jim Roseberry :) rig turned gen. purpose-rig so I'll have to check if it's even pci-e'.
Job one here is backing up and building a new C' drive. If need be I can go USB for the b/u at least.
Click to expand...

At very least you'll have a pci slot in there. I'd be surprised if you didn't.
Are you not just keeping the C drive as-is? If you wanted to migrate it to SATA for some reason you could probably use a bootable clone utility to save a lot of hassle.
You could just leave it alone, though.
 
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