I recently upgraded my PC (A8N motherboard) but kept my older IDE hard-drives which are both working well. However, it's time to look at more HD space so I'm thinking of buying a new SATA drive and using one of the serial ports available. My question- will there be ay compatibility issues in combing IDE and serial drives concurrently? Any down-sides that I need to know about? My OS is on a partition of one of my IDE drives (obviously), which is C:. I'm hoping that the new serial drive won't want to bump the others to be C:, but will tag along with a greater partition letter than my highest one currently.Thanks for any answers.Bruce.

Putting in a SATA drive next to your current PATA drives will not be a problem. As far as drive letter, it should normally just follows the ABC and name it what ever letter is next availb. Even if for some odd reason it wont, you can easily change the drive letter yourself (caution when doing it, but its possible) So in all no worries, and you'll get slightly better performance too with SATA. do not get a Maxtor drive they do still give problems with Nforce and in general arent the most relaible drives (excl. the lucky users, but i never recomend them)

Hi Bruce,No advice on SATA since I am caught in "old technology" at the moment. How is the flying? I have become a "currency pilot", only flying every 90days to stay current.As an aside, I use to recommend Maxtor drives over other brands. Don't know their SATA quality. Seagate just purchased Maxtor, so who knows where their quality will go.W. Sieffert

I persoanlly will only buy Maxtor drives, there quiet, fast, and I have never had a single issue with any that I have owned. I have a SATA 300GB Maxtor 7200RPM with 16MB cache and its excellent, it works fine with my ATA 80GB Maxtor no problems.

Consider yourself lucky then, sofar within the past six months 4 maxtor sata's have died on me (ON COMPANY SERVER)..since then they have been replaced by WD. If in doubt google for maxtor, youd be surprised at the negative comments, buisness and personal users. Anyway being against Maxtor is MY own opinion, based upon personal as work experiances

Thanks Davis,Much appreciate your helpful comments.Bruce.

Hi Bill,Thanks- your help is always appreciated.I'm worse than you, I'm beyond currency :). My club has the 3 take-offs and landings every 60 days as currency to fly without requiring a check-out, and I'm also beyond the 90 day FAA currency too. The real tough one is the IFR rating currency, which is every 6 months and with an additional 6 month grace period before an PIC is triggered, which I'm nowhere near yet- there are just so many other things that I want (and need) to do right now.Bruce.

Just one of the reasons I hesitate starting instrument training!If you are in Orlando, we can get your instrument currency done in our flight simulator cheaper than flying the aircraft.W. Sieffert

Yes, IR currency takes a lot of time, effort and money. We also have a Frasca simulator that is FAA approved for currency, and for a portion of the IR initial flight training.Have a great day, Bruce.

I'm waiting on a seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10 SATA ULTRA ATA-100 p/n ST3320620AS to arrive here.I've had the single SATA hd in this system for a couple of years and it works so well. The controllers on my ASUS P4c800E deluxe will allow a mix between IDE and SATAI know my current WD 120GB SATA and the new 320gb can't work at full RAID config but don't care for now.. I hope the new Seagate will end up being the drive in new system and then add another of the same then.Also to note (since I had to make sure before I ordered mine).. many of the new ones are SATA II and require a mb that supports that for full transfer speeds BUT they can be jumpered to work with SATA I mother boards also. Just at half the data speed.

Thanks, I appreciate the info.Bruce.

OH... one more important item to consider..Make sure you get a drive that is for desktop and not server use as the server type is only good for data storage and can not be made bootable for normal PC use.In the case of this Seagate it needed to be at least version 7200.9 or above it seems. Some sites state "Desktop" / "Server" on each offering and some don't.