IDE to SATA mirroring.

[Maverick69]

Hello all.
I just got a new sata drive and it didn't come with any software. First off, I plugged the sata drive into the sata1 plug on my motherboard. Bios detected the drive fine but it is not detected by windows. I'm hoping that this will be remedied when I mirror the old ide to the new sata, so I was wondering what program do I need to use to be able to mirror my ide to the sata drive? Thanks.

 

[Lord Evermore]

You can download the software from the manufacturer. Ghost is a very popular retail application for copying drives, and there are lots of freeware apps you can find with a search.

However if you can't get the drive to be detected at all by Windows, copying the data to the new drive is going to leave you with a non-bootable system. Check the Device Manager and see if the drive is detected at all. You may need to install the IDE drivers for your chipset in order to make a native SATA drive usable by Windows. You can also set the BIOS properties for the SATA ports to run in IDE mode, which disables some functionality such as Native Command Queuing if the controller supports it, but there shouldn't be any performance difference in real usage.

 

[Maverick69]

I'm going to give it in a try in about an hour and report back. Thanks for the tips.

 

[corkyg]

Much of what Lord E said is motherboard dependent. Example - the Asus P4PE series cannon enable its two SATA ports without RAID. But, it has another option others may not have. There is a separate IDE (PATA) controller port for RAID. That allows a PATA drive and a SATA drive to be used in a RAID 0 or RAID 1 array. Mirroring is then part of the setup process by the on-board RAID controller.

Another option is a simple adapter that plugs into a PATA drive to make it a SATA drive. It is keyed to only go one way. Then you can have a pair of SATA drives.

Adapter

The motherboard also has a SATA/RAID driver for XP that comes on the mobo CD.

Point is, all motherboards are not alike in this area.

All you can do is experiment and try different things. Check your motherboard manual for specifics.

 

[TTM77]

SATA is slower then PATA right?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Other way around. PATA tops out at 100MBps or 133MBps speeds (only Maxtor drives do ATA133). SATA 1st generation is 150MBps, 2nd gen is 300MBps. There will be no new versions of PATA but there's already plans for 600MBps SATA.

However physically the drives are still the same, so the actual sustained transfer rates aren't any better than they would have been with PATA on newer generation drives, simply due to mechanical and density performance changes. If you also happen to get a drive that uses a bridge chip (I don't think any of the current generation do, only the first models) then you're still technically limited to PATA speeds because that's what the drive itself is actually communicating with.