hey i have my hard drive now stored at the bottom part of my computer case. The IDE cable connecting the hard drive is constricting air flow in my PC and raising the temps. I was wondering if i would be able to use SATA cables and SATA hooksups for the hard drive(boot hard drive) to work, and not have the big IDE cable in the way?
gibbey531 the product I suggested will do that. It plugs into the back of your IDE harddrive, and provides a SATA port. You then use a SATA cable to connect the SATA port on the device to the SATA port on the motherboard.
I have limited IDE port availability on most of my boards as IDE has been slowly disappearing.
I use several IDE to SATA converters and they work just fine.
I have them on older HDD?s which I use for backup and I also use one on my Plextor PX716A DVD RW drive which was too good to leave out my main machine.
I use the following versions, I'm not sure where you are located so I will link to a US and UK site, the latter being where I got mine.
They are cheap, but small and work very well, all you need is supply the drive with power as usual, plug the dongle into IDE port, then plug in the SATA cable to the dongle and also provide the dongle with power via a standard floppy drive type power cable.
They are only SATA 1.0 compliant, but they work on backward compatible SATA 2.0 ports without any issues, and as IDE is slower than SATA 1 anyway, it won't be a problem with slowing the drive down.
Here are a few runs I've just done to show speed, I don't have any IDE drives connected via IDE standard only via converters, so can't compare that.
These test are as they come, no tweaking or defragging done, just run with PC doing other stuff in background.
TOP: Seagate 160GB IDE via SATA -IDE converter compared against standard SATA 2 Seagate Drive 80GB.
MIDDLE: Same Seagate IDE drive compared against a WD Raptor 74GB SATA 1 drive.
BOTTOM: Same Seagate IDE drive against 2x WD Raptors (SATA 1) in RAID 0.
