Doing Work on your computer? Just got a new computer and plan on augmenting your hard drive space with your old one?

Here are some things you may want to think about:

PATA (Parallel ATA or IDE) interfaces rank more highly in the pecking order than SATA interfaces do.

Drives that are on the IDE connections will need to be the system disk with the OS system on it to avoid problems.

If you don't do this regardless of your BIOS settings, you will eventually get a "system disk not found" error.

SATA (Serial ATA) interfaces are relatively new to the standards game, and a welcome one as far as I'm concerned. They are quickly replacing the confusing "master / slave" codes and bulky cable of the PATA standard for all kinds of drive systems.

SATA drives are faster, but all SATA drives have equal standing for CPU calls, and therefore data is first come first served. Because of the distinct lack of prioritization built into the standard, when linked into a system with PATA hard drives, the SATA will automatically take a back seat.

To avoid problems, it would be beneficial to simply place the Operating System and boot options to point directly to the PATA drive.

Put your important data on the other drive. This will also help protect the data from viruses, because they tend to attack system files more than data files.

HAPPY COMPUTING