Hi there, I am thinking of re-building my PC in the near future and with a dual core processor. (PC Gaming upgrade in mind) I realise I need to change my RAM to DDR2 and my G/fix card to PCI-E but at least for the meantime, i wanted to keep my DVD drives and both my hard drives (120G and 250G 7200RPM) This means I need a modern board but be able to use two PATA connnections with SATA as an option for the future. I have been biased towards AMD of late but would consider intel if the board can do what I want. My current board is socket 754 with a sempron 3000+ in it and it has 2 traditional IDE connections and 2 SATA connections. Any M/board reccomendations for what i want?
You won't find a recent board with 2 IDE connectors I don't think. IDE is pretty much never used for hard drives any more so manufacturers have stopped assuming so. What you can do as an interim is buy a PCI card with extra IDE ports on it like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815124022 One extra port is all you'll need since you can run both your slave HDD and DVD drive off that, and use the one on the board as the master for your OS hard drive. The card also comes with 2 extra S-ATA ports. As for a decent upgrade for the CPU and motherboard I'd suggest: CPU: E2180 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116052 MoBo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128059&Tpk=P35-DS3L GPU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161211 RAM: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145034 That lot's $440 with $50 of rebates to use as well. You'll also probably need a better power supply to run the new hardware as well, so something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139003
Thanks for the quick response. I thought there was probably a PCI solution. Your suggestions made me think actually that as an interim I would probably put a PATA HDD (master) and a DVD RW on the existing board slot and look at adding a new SATA HDD (SLAVE) and possibly ROM drive in the future. See any problems with that?? Can you run non Raid SATA together with PATA equpiment. I have'nt tried it on my existing socket 754 M/Board. SATA was quite new back then and I have never bothered looking into it. Perhaps I should have since I only just bought the 250G PATA HDD slave and maybe I should have gone SATA right now.
You can't find them for good reason my friend, IDE is a relic of the 80's, it's time to make the switch to SATA. With data transfer rates of 6Gbp/s soon to be implemented and none of those annoying wide-ass cables, there's no reason why you should stick with IDE if your upgrading.
There are no real issues in you running your OS hard drive and your DVD drive together off the single port, but obviously you lose a slot for your hard drives. What you could do is put that hard drive in an external enclosure and run it over USB instead. Since it doesn't contain your operating system it'll work fine that way, just a little bit slower. You can run PATA and SATA equipment together fine, RAID or no RAID, they're entirely separate controllers usually. Buying the IDE drive was perhaps a little unwise as S-ATA drives offer newer technology nowadays and are therefore faster, quieter drives. This has nothing to do with the benefits of the SATA interface itself, more that its the new technology, so drives made on it will be newer revisions. Amir: Not quite a relic of the 80s, S-ATA was relatively new and scarce up until around 2004. As for the data rates of 6Gbps, have you ever seen a hard drive capable of writing that fast? The peak transfer speed of a S-ATA drive is around 90MB/s for something like a Raptor, which wouldn't even saturate the ATA-100 bus. The neat cabling and better power delivery system is why S-ATA is useful.
