Newer motherboards with PATA question..

[bcsman]

Am looking to upgrade and see most of the newer MB's for AMD or Intel have either no PATA connections or only one. At this time I have no SATA hard drives so my question is if I purchase one of these newer boards can I use the 1 PATA connection with my IDE drives to act as primary and/or secondary drives?? Or must I have at least one SATA drive hooked to boot or use?? Or must I look for an older board that will run Core 2 or Athlon dual core processors that still have two PATA connectors?? I know they are out there but harder to find. Thanks for any input or help....

 

[vailr]

For your situation, I would recommend replacing any optical IDE drives with SATA.
Under $20 at Newegg.
Connecting 2 IDE hard drives to a single IDE port should work fine.
But: mixing an optical drive and a hard drive on a single IDE port would not be best, as far as speed and reliability.
Another alternative would be to put the largest IDE HD in an external USB enclosure, and buy a new replacement SATA HD. Use the external HD for backup storage, powered on only when needed.

 

[Fallengod]

I had the same issue upgrading recently to an i5-2500k system. I didnt even realize the mobo didnt have PATA before I purchased it. Luckily, I had almost all SATA drives already anyways, I just had to sell my PATA dvd burner and bought a SATA replacement.

And yeah, you should really phase out PATA drives, systems in the future arnt going to have them. If you have many PATA drives you cant part with, you may want to either make sure you get a mobo with PATA ports or just stick with an older system.

 

[JeffMD]

Hd's connected through usb are slow. Sata had been out for quite some time, think its time to upgrade dude.

 

[bcsman]

Yes agree the smartest upgrade would be to Sata. To be honest this is for my second computer so don't need the newest fastest stats. Just mainly wanted to be sure I could use the IDE connector on the newer boards to use and boot from. According to vailr looks like I can so will probably do that for now. Trying to keep the price as low as possible right now. When I get a few more $$ will upgrade to the Sata parts.

 

[pitz]

There's still a few Sandy Bridge boards with embedded PATA (ie: P8H67-M-Evo has an ATA connector). But probably time to move on, given the cost of replacement SATA peripherals and the ATA drives haven't been really sold in 4 years.

 

[dawp]

you could add a IDE controller card like this but why bother when you could get a sata HDD for less then $100 unless it's not within your budget.

 

[bononos]

you could add a IDE controller card like this but why bother when you could get a sata HDD for less then $100 unless it's not within your budget.

Theres sata->pata converters out there which are cheap - around 10 bucks so you wouldn't need to use up a pci slot. But they might be hard to find nowadays.

 

[vailr]

Just mainly wanted to be sure I could use the IDE connector on the newer boards to use and boot from.

Note: newer motherboard IDE ports mostly run off a JMicron controller. Could require adding F6 drivers after booting from your Windows operating system install disk.

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

Theres sata->pata converters out there which are cheap - around 10 bucks so you wouldn't need to use up a pci slot. But they might be hard to find nowadays.

They sell those @ MC, the Egg, etc, but are hit/miss. The one I have (Vantec?) works well with hard drives and an IDE Zip drive, but didn't work with my DVD-ROM drive.

You're better off spending the extra 5 bucks & getting a SATA drive.

 

[Fallengod]

Yeah ive heard mixed things about those pata/sata adapter. For optical drives, its definitely not worth it when a brand new sata drive can be had for like $15-20 these days. Why spend $10+ on an adapter when you can just get a brand new drive.

 

[bcsman]

yes will purchase a sata optical drive and at this time use my IDE drive. Will later work on a sata hard drive also. Will keep in mind the F6 option when installing windows.

 

[C1]

If you are actually calling what you intend to do an upgrade, then add a SATA HDD. One of the biggest bottlenecks of a PC is HDD I/O. Besides throughput, SATA is more SCSI like and more readily supports multi-tasking.

Unfortunately, this is one of the more difficult times to upgrade HDD in light of the prolonged shortages. Besides the HDD shelves being bare at the local Frys, the prices are premium. You will have to shop more diligently.

 

[Gs dewd]

You can serch fleabay for the abit seriall adapters which will adapt your ide drives to sata.

 

[piasabird]

Putting old drives in a new build is asking them to wear out before the build does. Sooner or later your hard drives will wear out. Those darn IDE/PATA cables are a pain in the neck when one drive fails to work.

 

[bcsman]

Found a good deal on a used 320GB Sata drive here and purchased a CD/DVD Sata drive at NewEgg. Thanks for all the advise.