can a IDE & Sata hard drives be slaved together some how?

Question

Greetings all!

I have a bit of an older computer which has a 160GB 7200RPM IDE hard drive and my roommate has a older laptop he is having troubles with. I tired doing a fix on it using a windows 7 repair disk he didn't have any saved disk images and so i then tried for a fresh install which then failed. After that i tried some diagnostics of the ram which turned out to be ok,but then i got an error message which tol me there maybe a issue with one of my I/O devices so with the ram ok and the O.S despite not taking the optical drive did load it and so checks out fine. So my thoughts were perhaps it's the hard drive then so i took it out and i've never done a slaving of an additional hard drive but from what i read it's simple but can a desktop IDE HDD have a Sata hard drive from a laptop slaved to it ? I want to see if there is anyway to check it's functionality out? my MOBO does support Sata so could or would i then just connect the laptop sata hard drive to my computer directly to test it out? any advice would be most welcome. oh also when slaving another drive do i if any have to change any settings in my bios ?? thanks all!!

Answer 1

If your motherboard has both SATA and IDE headers then yes, you can connect both types of drives, but they won't be slaved together (on the same cable).



For example if your desktop (which has the primary IDE drive) also has a SATA connector on the motherboard which isn't being used, you could connect the laptop drive to that- although you might have to play with the BIOS settings to ensure the system boot from your IDE drive.



The easiest option is to simply buy an adapter cable which allows you to connect any SATA or IDE drive via USB, like this:



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200155





In response to your earlier question about external graphics cards for laptops/notebooks, the answer is "sometimes, yes". There are devices which allow you to connect regular desktop graphics cards to a laptop. Unlike USB devices which are too slow for gaming, these actually work quite nicely. However there are some restrictions.



1) They only work with an external monitor, not your laptop's built-in screen.



2) Only laptops which have an Expresscard port are compatible- that's the interface required.



3) They're pretty expensive.



One such device that's currently available is the ViDock. You can buy different models- more expensive models accomodate higher-end cards, but even the cheapest model works for a Radeon HD 5570/6670 or GeForce GT430/GT440 (cards which don't require external power), and those are a huge upgrade from integrated graphics.



http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock



Note on point #3 - you have the cost of the ViDock, plus the cost of a graphics card, and possibly the cost of a monitor, if you don't have one already. But the option does exist.



The Asus XG station is an older device which basically did the same thing. But it was discontinued years ago without ever getting a widespread US release.



http://blog.laptopmag.com/asus-xg-station-rises-from-the-dead

Answer 2

If you are meaning can you boot off of the IDE hard drive and access the Sata drive, the answer is Yes.

Just connect the SATA hard drive, and make sure the BIOS settings are set to boot from the IDE drive.

Answer 3

NO two different interfaces.



It would have be like a hybrid Raid device which I don't think exists.

Answer 4

nope