Can I Mix SATA and IDE hardware

[jim.mar]

I have an old machine that I am refurbishing.   It is about 5 years old. It has two hard drives and I want to replace the MASTER hard drive with one that is SATA driven and the SLAVE hard drive with an unused one that I have had for several year that is IDE.  I know that my motherboard has SATA/RAID ability as I have recently replaced my DVD burner with one that is SATA driven and it works fine.   QUESTION: Can I mix the two drives, and do I have to jumper them or somehow identify them as MASTER and SLAVE?   Thanks for reading this,  JIM

[Dusty]

QUESTION: Can I mix the two drives, and do I have to jumper them or somehow identify them as MASTER and SLAVE?

The drives will have independent controllers so there is no problem and no need to jumper master/slave.  The "ide" drive can be jumpered as Master or Slave on its controller depending on whether or not another device is connected to that controller, there is no master/slave jumpering with SATA drives.

Whichever drive contains the OS should be set in bios.

[Quantos]

I have an old machine that I am refurbishing.   It is about 5 years old. It has two hard drives and I want to replace the MASTER hard drive with one that is SATA driven and the SLAVE hard drive with an unused one that I have had for several year that is IDE.  I know that my motherboard has SATA/RAID ability as I have recently replaced my DVD burner with one that is SATA driven and it works fine.   QUESTION: Can I mix the two drives, and do I have to jumper them or somehow identify them as MASTER and SLAVE?   Thanks for reading this,  JIM

Your existing motherboard is probably only SATA I, if so then I would suggest buying a SATA II controller addon card to control the SATA drive, which I would make the root drive.  I assume that based on the age that you stated.