What's the difference between an Enhanced IDE hard drive and a Serial ATA hard drive?

[Onan the Clumsy]

I just wondered because I have a spare IDE from a previous machin and an empty bay in my new pc. I tried to put the drive in, but the connectors are different, so I looked and the current drive is the ATA...hey that makes it an aviation related thread :}

[Green Lamp]

Your new machine has a SATA (Serial ATA drive) connected with a small cable to your hard drive.

You will probably find that you have a DVD/CD Burner connected to an EIDE cable. EIDE uses the old flat 80 pin cable.

You should be able to connect your old hard drive on the same EIDE cable after making sure that the optical drive and the hard drive are correctly configured as master and slave. PM me if you need further help.

[Onan the Clumsy]

Ok, the only problem with that it the CDs are at the top of the case and the HDs at the bottom and the ribbon cable wouldn't be long enough. Maybe I could chain the cable from the old PC, but I'd have to swipe the power feed as well.

In any event, I put the CD from the old machine into the new, so I've already terminated that cable run.

[spannersatcx]

You don't have to put it in the same place as the other HDD, any 5.25in bay will do, it would depend on the case somewhat, some (like mine) have 2 free 5.25in drive bays under the CD/DVD drives.:)

There would normally be 2 IDE sockets on a MOB, ide 0 and 1. So there may well be a spare connector on your MOB, have a look.

[Stoney X]

Something to watch out for. I had some difficulty adding an IDE hard drive to a machine that already had SATA drives because the allocation of drive letters shifted the SATA drives up, so C became D, D became E, and the newly installed IDE got C. Which all meant the booting of windows didn't work. Required some BIOS changes that I can't remember if I ever sort or if I pulled the IDE drive.

Regards
Stoney

[PPRuNeUser0211]

Stoney - on your issue, the standard setup page of the Bios will have a "boot order" section or the like - if you do install a new hdd, just make sure that SATA is on the list somewhere (preferably at the top!) and the bios will track down windows somewhere...

Onan, if you're lucky, you'll have a second IDE socket on your motherboard, next to the first where your cd drives are plugged in (it has to be the same size, one that looks similar but smaller is for your disk drive)... If you do have one there, rob the cable off your old pc and install accordingly,

failing that, you may have to sacrifice a cd drive for the extra hard disk. If you want to do that, you can get an adaptor that will allow you to (securely!) fit your hard disk into the larger bay where the cd drive now is.

Failing that you can buy an ide>SATA convertor http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=176415

or failing that, you can convert your ide hard disk into an external usb hard disk with one of the following:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Products.asp?CatID=16&Category=Hard+Drives&ThumbNails=Yes&FilterCategories=380&FilterMinPrice=&FilterMaxPrice=&FilterKeywords=