Along with all of the other replies which have valid points, there are a few other 
considerations to take into account.

IME on thousands of machines that I have built or repaired, I can offer the following 
issues that I have observed.

1)  If you try a new or known good IDE cable, then you can have broken connectors 
or solder joints on either the HDD printed circuit board or the motherboard.

2)  loose jumpers on the HDD can be more problematic than data cable connections, 
so make sure the jumper is tight on BOTH pins, not that it just feels tight.  On 
some, and especially older drives, this can cause a drive to not be detected at all.

3)  if all else fails, try another HDD.  A drive (or a motherboard) can have intermittent 
failures, and oddly enough, moving connections can cause it to "cure"itself for a 
little while.  If the HDD manufacturer has a diagnostics utility, run it and see 
if it report anything.  Just because it may say nothing is wrong, doesn't mean there 
isn't IME..

4)  lastly, I have found SATA connectors to be worse than PATA connectors.  Not all 
of the wires or pins are used in a PATA connector believe it or not.  The worst connector 
is the power connector on a PATA drive (and not any better on a SATA drive either). 
 I've seen many broken solder joints on printed circuit boards and loose sockets 
that plug into the drive.  Make sure all of the female ends are tight enough on the 
pins.  Bend them closed a little just to make sure.  I do this as a matter of routine. 
 Just an once of prevention down the road...

You can run PATA and SATA drives together but as noted before, there can be issues 
when both are connected when trying to install WIndows.  Many BIOS' will still give 
preference to the PATA IDE when the drive or partition is marked active and a bootable 
system is found on it.  So install with only the SATA connected if you decide to 
add a SATA controller board.  Then connect your PATA drives and see what happens. 
 If you have issues, then you may have to put your PATA drive in a USB encloser to 
off-load any data etc, then format it, or use a utility or disk management to remove 
the active status, repartition and reformat it.  

The last note is that you will have to load drivers from the floppy drive for the 
SATA card at the very beginning of an XP install for the drive to be used as a boot 
drive/system..  A SATA drive will be a little faster but that all depends on other 
factors such as buss, CPU and memory speed of your system.  It may or may not be 
worth the money..







On Sunday, June 15, 2008 at 5:53 pm, Jim McDonald wrote:

>I have a Pent 4 Abit SG-71 board.  I have IDE hard drives but I want to use a SATA 

>hd because it might be faster. I will need some kind of adapter to use SATA on this 

>board.  I have about 1 GB ram and I can upgrade that to 2GB.  I really don't want 

>to upgrade to a duel core board that has SATA connections because I don't use it 

>for high graphics or gaming and mainly use word processing and data type software 

>for most of my work.  What do you recommend?  

>Jim 

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