Quick IDE|SATA Question

[OrbitzXT]

I have a 80GB IDE by itself right now on Master. Any day now my 250GB Sata HD should arrive. What would be the best way to set this up? Do I need to do anything special or can I leave the IDE on Master as it is and just plug the SATA drive in and use that as well?

Edit: I knew I forgot a question. I see all this SATA II 3.0GB stuff. My motherboard is Asus P5AD2 E-Premium, can I use SATA II products or is that something that you need a newer motherboard to utilize?

[Paul Komski]

You can generally use SATA II drives on SATA I boards directly and without any problems though sometimes you need to set a jumper on the drive to limit it to SATA I access.

Just connect the cable to one of the SATA ports on the Mobo where it functions quite independently from your IDE drive. If you want to boot to the drive you will need to alter the BIOS setup but if you are just using it as additional storage you should simply need to initialise the drive by partitioning and formatting it to fit your own needs.

The 250 gig size shouldnt be a problem (it breaches the 128GiB/137GB LBA limit) as long as you are running at least WinXP SP1 or Win2K SP4. This is simply a function of its size and not because it is SATA per se.