SATA and IDE Hard Drive

[Cydrid]

I just recently bought a new SATA drive I plan on installing the OS and all other files on it. I'm currently using an IDE drive and I was wondering if I'd have any problems running them both. It won't be RAID. Would I need to set the jumper on the IDE one to Slave, or just leave it the default way? I was also planning on on installing the OS first and partitioning the SATA drive, then hooking my old IDE up and copying all my files onto the new hard drive, then finally formatting and partitioning the old hard drive as a Scratch and Paging File drive. Would this be a good way to go about doing this or is there a better way? Also, a noob question, I know the SATA drive can take both power connectors, which should I use since I have both? Thanks for the help in advance.

Edit: Oh, and I just remembered, if I were to buy an IDE to SATA converter for my old drive, would that bring the transfer speeds up to SATA or just allow me to connect it to a SATA connector?

 

[phisrow]

They should work together absolutly without trouble. Just leave the PATA drive as it is now, assuming it works, plug in the SATA drive, and set your BIOS to boot from it.

Either power connector on a SATA drive will work, no real diffirence.

IDE to SATA converters have no effect on transfer speed(probably a slight negative effect, actually). They are just there to make cabling easier, or deal with aggressively legacy free setups. No real point in buying one, unless that ribbon cable upsets you.

As for scratch and paging files, there are two considerations: You obviously want your scratch file to be on the fastest available drive; but you also don't want lots of contention between the program using the scratch file and other processes for disk access, as mechanical seek times suck. You might consider doing a quick test to see which configuration works better. As for paging files, I believe that Windows lets you have up to one per partition. Again, some experimentation might well be in order. Your new drive is probably faster; but also likely to be under more load. You might be better off with page files on one, the other, or both.