PATA hard drive with SATA adapter

RoundTower

I took my Seagate Barracuda HD with PATA interface out of my old computer, and want to get it into my new Dell one as a secondary HD. The motherboard has no IDE slots but 2 SATA slots, one of which is connected to my primary HD, the other to my optical drive. I want to replace the optical drive with the Seagate HD.

I bought a generic SATA-to-PATA adapter from Maplins and connected it up, both power and data. I'm pretty sure this is all connected properly. When I power on the computer I get a green and red LED on the adapter (don't know what these mean and there is no documentation) but the system doesn't recognise the drive. Not in the setup menu and not in the operating system (Windows XP).

questions:
1. what jumper settings should I be using? I thought it probably didn't matter, but I tried it as master, slave, and cable select with no luck.
2. is there anything else I need to do to make the system recognise the device?

any help would be appreciated, if you need more info I can provide it. Thanks.

RoundTower

update: it's a problem with either the adapter or the hard drive. I think the adapter is just a piece of **** that I will return as soon as I get the chance. But I haven't been able to check if the hard drive works with a native ATA motherboard yet.

rrpc

Why would you want to do this? You're going to slow your machine down by having a PATA drive there. If you really want to use the PATA drive as a backup device, you should get a USB drive caddy and connect it that way.

Otherwise if you still insist on installing it, get a PCI PATA controller and connect it that way instead. That way you can still use your second SATA controller.

I'd steer well clear of adaptor cables.

RoundTower

I don't have any free PCI slots. I didn't look into USB as an option.

Can you elaborate on how having a PATA drive will affect the machine's performance? Do you mean it will slow down the other drive? AFAIK the adapter makes it look completely like a SATA device.

All I really want is to be able to get all my stuff off that drive. If it really is going to affect performance I don't mind paying a few quid for a new SATA drive and copying everything across.

astrofool

Drive caddy sounds like the easiest way. You can get ones which support both SATA and PATA if you ever want to upgrade the drive itself.

Your PATA drive will be the weak link in the machine, being a few years old, it's performance will be slower than that of the newer SATA drive. AFAIK, the SATA interfaces themselves are self contained, unlike PATA where in a master/slave combo, the slowest speed drive was used for both.

Varkov

But surley if its only being used as a storage place for files it isn't going to cause too much of a problom?

But if you were going to install an OS / games on it, yeah it would be slower.

Agree that the usb caddy is probably the best option. Handier in case you want to take it somewhere too.

RoundTower

it will mostly have music/video/data of all sorts on it -- it does have windows xp already installed but I intend to get rid of that or at least not use it, I don't need a dual boot machine.

ty all for your help. still haven't sorted it out but only because I haven't made the effort, but either my adapter or the drive is broken.