SATA and IDE

You have 2 basic methods of accomplishing what you want;
1. remove the ide drive, replace w/ sata and reinstall operating system and everything else.
2. use a program like Norton Ghost to clone the ide drive and load everything onto the sata drive.

You cannot just copy the operating system and all programs from one drive to another.

Others here will elaborate upon this topic.

 

No, you cannot just move the programs that are now in c\Program Files.
You must reinstall them.

Do NOT start until you have made backups of your important files, like email, email account settings, favorites, data, downloads, etc etc. Best to burn them onto cds or dvds.

After the install on the sata, you can then install the ide as a slave drive (not boot drive) and access your data files there. Copy important stuff like documents & music,over to the sata. When done copying wanted files, use Disk Managenet to erase the ide and set it up as a logical drive and use it to store your important data.

However, the EASSIEST route is to keep the ide just the way it is, install the sata drive and use the sata only for storing stuff that's now on the ide, other than installed programs. For example, if drive is filled with mp3 files and movies, move them all to the sata. You may have to rebuild any music playlists.

 

Matt

Up until a few months ago I had 2 x PATA (EIDE) drives and 1 X SATA drive. The OS's (Triple boot) were on one of the PATA drives, the other drives were for storage.

I then installed another SATA drive and put the OS on that leaving 1 x SATA and 2 X PATA for storage.

The computer is no faster with the OS on the SATA drives. The first generation SATA drives rarely outperform a good PATA drive - the second generation which are beginning to surface may be a different story

BTW - if you do decide to use the SATA for the OS you will need to load the RAID drivers at F6 during the install as noted by skeet6961 - even though you do not intend to use RAID - my experience with Hitachi SATA drives and Asus A8V mobo.

 

FYI:
I just built a new system for myself w/ a SATA2 drive and it's amazingly faster than my IDE drives ever were. SATA1, however is hardly noticable at all. I did not need to load any additional drivers during XPPro w/ SP2 install. (not using raid)

What I specifically noticed:
1. faster defrags
2. faster ghost imaging and restoring, by almost 60% faster.
3. faster file copying from drive to drive or from partition to partition.

new system specs:
Intel D945Psn MB
3.0 P4 w/ HT
1GB DDR2 4200
WD 200 GB SATA2
existing cdrw & dvdrw

compared to my laptop w/
3.04 P4 w/ HT
512 DDR
60 GB HD

also compared to:
P4 2,4 Celeron
512 DDR PC2700
WD 10 GB 7200 HD
Samsung 10 GB 5400 HD

 

As I thought Thanks for the info.

 

real example of SATA2 speed with Norton Ghost.
I did a restore last night of this fresh install which contains 99% of all my 3rd pary apps, tweaks, settings and adjustements. The ghost image is 1.09 GB made using the Fast compression setting in Ghost. The entire restore from selecting the .gho image to restore from to the reset computer button took 45 seconds! A same size image on my ide drives takes about 3-5 minutes.

I was actually scared! I thought, "this can't be right ". I thought that perhaps the image was bad, that I'd end up w/ a hosed drive, having to reinstall everything. But all is fine.