Using an SATA drive for the 'C' drive - Can this be done successfully?

[DarthRanger]

Hi -

I need to replace my aging 'C' drive; its a 6+ year old Seagate ATA model. I don't want to go with an IDE replacement as I will be doing an upgrade probably within 1 year, so I'm wondering if I can connect a new SATA drive to the motherboard and use new the SATA as drive C ? Does this make sense to do, as I want to use this newer drive later on when I do the system upgrade to a Conroe chip and motherboard?

I'd appreciate any help or suggestions on this.

 

[senterprises]

Yeah it makes sense as long as you have SATA on your MOBO or a SATA PCI card, you just plug it in a ghost over from the old drive.

 

[Lord Evermore]

On your system, an SATA drive can be a drop-in replacement for an IDE drive. You'll need to enable the SATA ports if they're not already, and make sure you plug the drive into one of the ports that is controlled by the ICH5 southbridge, not the add-in Promise controller. Either make a backup of the IDE drive and then swap them and restore it, or have them both plugged in at once to do a drive to drive copy using Ghost, PartitionMagic, or the manufacturer utilities which you can download if you buy an OEM drive. Most of these I think can make the partitions larger on the new drive when they copy, to use the entire amount of space, if you don't plan to make a new partition out of the extra.

SATA is software-compatible with IDE so the drivers are the same. However if the controller is connected via the PCI bus (as the Promise chip is on your board) then Windows requires that drivers be loaded in order to function. If for some reason you had to use the Promise chip for your boot drive, you could enable the chip before the replacement, let Windows detect it and install the drivers, that way it knows it exists when you boot with the new drive.

 

[corkyg]

The short, non-emoting response to the question is "yes."

Sometimes the course of action is dictated by your mobo. Example - the Asus P4PE has 2 SATA ports. BIOS enables them but only as SATA/RAID. So, the single SATA drive must be used as a RAID 0 array. That is well documented on the Asus website, and I have found it to be true.

With a P4PE, you can't have SATA w/o RAID.