hi all, question for ye if i can beg yer favour.

i was lucky enough recently to come across 2 x 500gb hard drive for free prettymuch. i must have done something right...



problem is, my computer uses IDE ports, and both hard drives are the newer SATA type connectors.

i was looking at these type things on das bay -

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/2-Way-IDE-To-SATA-or-SATA-To-IDE-...QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem


im confused though. ide port on the motherboard, is it the same as the ide port in the back of an ide hard drive?

i need to connect the two hard drives on the same data cable. theres two spaces on the data cable for devices. can i just click one of these converters on at each junction?

It's possible, but you won't know until you literally hook it up. Your motherboard may not recognize anything you hook up to it through a converter like that, or it may work perfectly.


What model of hard drive are they (brand, model)? Are they SATA-I (SATA-150) or SATA-II (SATA-300). Most SATA-II drives can be jumpered to run at SATA-1 speeds, and then you can buy a cheap SATA-1 "paddle card" to hook them up to.


Let me know what drives you're working with, and I'll help you get them working.

Get a sata board and run them in raid,they are like 40 bucks or so www.tigerdirect.com

this is one of them

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=301

and this is the other

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=c89ef14...a0aRCRD&locale=en-US

thanks guys. was always wondering what raid meant Jimski, raid drivers and such.. interesting..

Pan i couldnt see that info written on the drives but i think its on those pages?

The main thing to get past is your BIOS and operating system. Depending on how old you system is will determine a lot. Your BIOS may reject it and not reognize it though there may be an update or software to make it work. Same for the OS. Your best bet would be to evaluate the parts you have. If you can get a new SATA ready motherboard and use some or all of your old components (graphics card, etc.) then your off to a great start. If not you could always buy and outboard hard drive case and run them from USB or firewire.

want to run them internally, its for my downloader mk. 1 machine

the computer is as old as the hills, im on it now, my mac power lead broke... its got xp and 192mb of ram... haha, pretty painful you can i magine but it works

its a dell optiplex gx110. i got it for five bucks.. is it possible to get a new motherboard for this sucker, or have i just asked an obvious question...

i suspect, if i got a different motherboard, itll no longer be a dell optiplex... but i might need a new case, cando, theres piles of them at the recycling centre..

thats kinda going off on a - lets build a new computer - tangent though, and i aint got time at the mo to do that

Sounds like you are ready for an upgrade.

yeah, but no. im chin deep here at the mo with college and woman, plus i really dont wanna pile cash into this comp, i dont usually use it for browsing, or anything in fact, besides downloading

i just need huge hard drives on it for storing files

If that's the main thing you want, I recommend:

Buying two external drive enclosures that take SATA drives. Jumper both drives so that they are SATA-I (you can get this from the respective product links that you posted), and finally, pick up a USB 2.0 PCI card with at least two ports. Install the drives into the cases, install the USB 2.0 card into your system, then you can just connect the drives via USB. Format each drive, and you're off to the races.



Problem solved. Your system is old, and you are far better off limiting what you put inside of it at this point. The system is too old to take advantage of a cheap software RAID add-on card, it will simply drain the life out of your computer trying to function.



Those are good drives.