Making a SATA master play with an IDE slave

Question

I just purchased a 8300 and it came with a SATA connected HDD.  My old HDD has a standard IDE serial connection.  I want the old HDD to remain in my computer as a slave so I have all the information from it available to me.  I cannot get the machine to recognize the IDE.  It is jumpered as a slave and attached to the second connection on the IDE cable.  Is it possible that the two drives will not work with one another?  If they will, what would I need to set in the BIOS (primary or secondary IDE) and what other measure will I need to take to make it work.  Thanks in advance.

TomXPS · Answer

If this is the only hard drive on the cable, you need to set it up as Master. Your SATA drive should still be your boot drive. Dell recommends that you use cable select as your jumper setting on the drive. Make sure you plug the IDE drive into the Master Position, I think the end connector. Enable the IDE Master on your Primary IDE channel in the setup.

Should work fine, I added an IDE drive to my XPS that had a SATA drive.

Sinjin25 · Answer

Tom is correct. Use the master position(the first connection toward the end) on the ide cable. Your SATA drive will still work as the boot drive. Set the ide as a master in the bios and set the jumper to CS on both drives(if the sata drive has one)

Archie00 · Answer

Thanks.  I will try that soon.  My temporary solution to transfer files was to connect it as the slave on the secondary IDE connector, after the CD ROM.  Yours seems like a more permanant solution.  Thanks again.

TomXPS · Answer

Not sure about the cable color, but the cable should be a double wired type that works for 66/100/133 drives. Any cable from the last 3 or 4 years should be of that type. I not sure your going to see much difference between a 100 or 133 transfer rate. The mother board I think supports 100 mbs the actual rate is much than than.

As far as the speed the SATA drives currently are not much faster by them self. When using multiple drives they will be faster than a IDE if your have both drives on the same controller channel. The SATA have seperate cables for each drive and do not have to share a channel with the other drive. Then of course if you setup RAID 0, the speed can be faster than a single SATA drive.

adlion944 · Answer

So I guess it's only slowing things down if I'm running an application/program off of the EIDE HD (which I'm not). All my programs are installed on the SATA HD.

The drive I'm speaking of is an Ultra ATA 100 drive and I've heard that it only reaches maximum speed with the cable that has a blue connector to the motherboard. The cable I have in there right now has 3 black connectors.

TomXPS · Answer

That has been a rumor, do not think it should be true. There are some tools out their to performance test your drives to give you the MB/s transfer rate. Try to find one, and compare before and after.

You already have some IDE devices in use already, the CD ROMS.

adlion944 · Answer

Do you guys know if adding an EIDE secondary drive slows down the purity of a SATA-only HD system?

I have a SATA as my "hero" drive, but I put my old EIDE drive in as an archive drive for files I'm backing up and I wondered if it slows things down at all.

Popeyethesailor · Answer

On my XPS Gen 2 the primary drive is SATA and I added a second IDE HD by doing the following:

I used the first connector on a multi-connector cable and jumpered the drive as a Master.

In the Bios Drive Configuration I set SATA Raid - OFF, SATA Primary Drive - Auto, SATA Secondary Drive - OFF, Primary Master Drive - Auto, Primary Slave Drive - OFF.

Windows XP picked up the new drive with no problem. My add-on HD is a Seagate, so I had downloaded a program called DiscWizard for Windows and it took care of the formatting.

This takes about 10 minutes to configure, format the HD and reboot with a useable second drive. Three hours was spent figuring it out.

TomXPS · Answer

Popeyethesailor:

You should turn the SATA RAID back to on. Just in case you ever want to setup RAID, if you ever reload the OS, the drivers needed for the RAID will not be loaded and I think it can only be done when the OS is in the Pre-Install stage. The IDE will work, with SATA RAID=ON.

I installed a IDE drive with the options set to "Yes", even before setting up RAID 1, by adding another SATA drive to my system.

Message Edited by TomXPS on 05-26-2004 06:55 PM

Sinjin25 · Answer

Popeye is there any way to add a SATA with an IDE HD that already has an Win xp on it? I dont care about having xp on it as i will be putting that on the SATA drive for a boot drive anyway. What i want is to be able to start it up and have access to the ide drive still so i can copy files over to the SATA. I have done this before and know i have to initialize the drive somehow. Could you remind me how its done? Will i need to format the IDE and lose everything?

Storage, Drives & Media

Making a SATA master play with an IDE slave

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