Hey all, I am venturing into a project here of building my first rig. I have a lot of experience with upgrading parts here and there, but not starting from scratch. Now, I had a lot of spare parts given to me. The parts given to me were a microATX case with motherboard, CPU, RAM, and PSU. I know they all work because I was able to subsitute cdrom and HDD from old machines just lying around. What I want to do is get the slow crap out and make it an efficiant machine. I was shopping for a motherboard and PSU, and am having trouble finding them with IDE Connections. Everything seems to be SATA. I was planning on using an extra 320GB IDE drive(working) that i had around. The PSU's that I see mostly have the sata power cable. I assume I need a psu with an IDE power cable? ALso is there anything special that I need the motherboard to have to make sure I can use the IDE drive. any special ribbon cables i need to connect the ide drive? Any help would be great. Thanks in advance from a newbee!
All the new motherboards only have one IDE connector. I have the same problem because all my drives are IDE and still useful. These are things I tried.
PCI IDE adapter cards, these have two extra IDE connectors, can connect 4 drives to this one. Problems - drives connected to these cards won't show up in BIOS, not useful for boot drives, and not reliable I've had problems with them sometimes not showing up in "my computer".
Harddrive gender changers, these adapter hook up to the back of the IDE drive and convert it to SATA. Problems - won't show up in BIOS, not useful for boot drives. And unreliable, I tried 3 different brands and they also have a habit of sometimes not showing up under "my computer". Also these gender changers require 2 power connectors, one for the drive and one for the gender changer.
USB ide bridge adapters, these hook up to the back of the drive, the cable then gets hookup to a USB 2.0 port. Problems - you need to have the available USB ports. Not useful for boot drives. You need to route the USB cable to the back of your computer. Same speed as an external usb 2.0 drive. Reliability is 100%, always showup under "my computer".
I recommend the USB bridge adapters as the only reliable way of using your IDE drives, that's what I have been using. This is the model I've been using (power adapter in box not required, just connect the normal PSU power cable to drive)
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=CL-IDE02&cat=HDD
The important note is to hook up your boot drive and DVDROM to the motherboard IDE connector.
