IDE to SATA cable

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miata54

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Dec 28, 2013
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I have an older HP PC (2006) which has four SATA and one 40 pin IDE port on the MB. I use this PC simply as a backup. The OS is XP. In cleaning out a closet, I found two WD 40GB HDD's that probably go back at least ten years for a previous PC on which I was running Win2K. The output port on these HDD's is 40 pin IDE. Could I simply use an IDE ribbon cable for data transfer on either of these HDD's? These would simply be used for backup with no OS.

Thanks
 
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haioko
It doesn't really matter. They're going to be accessed through the SATA drive. Realistically those jumpers were only used when you had exclusively only IDE drives and therefore you had to distinguish between which drive would be your main master drive with OS etc and the slave one which would be backups etc. You don't need to distinguish between the two as they're neither master or slave drives now. It'll be like putting two flash drives in to your pc, they'll come up as storage devices, your computer doesn't need to know which one to access first.
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haioko

haioko

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Yes, if there are IDE cables available then you can can attatch them to the IDE HDDs and still access them as normal. If you have IDE ports on your mobo then it should be fine, same with the different power supplies. SATA power cables are different to the 4 pin connectors used in IDE drives.
 
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miata54

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haioko

haioko

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Why have a big chunky piece of equiptment in his computer to convert SATA to IDE when he has the IDE facilities on his mobo? All computers still have 4 pin power connectors, especially ones that are 7 years old. If he has an IDE port and has a ribbon cable then what's the issue?
 
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haioko

haioko

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That only matters to the IDE drives if you're using a ribbon cable that splits in to two. If you are using one of them then it to be honest it doesnt matter. Your SATA drive will be your master by default. You shouldn't need to change any of the jumpers on either drives.

Just plug the drives in and get going!
 
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miata54

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Thanks Haioko.

The ribbon cable I'm looking at has two two IDE connectors, plus the connector to the MB, for a total of three. The two WD HDD's I found must have been the Master and Slave in my dinosaur PC as the jumpers are placed at "Master w/Slave" and "Slave" respectively. Seeing as both of these would be used as backup HDD's, would the jumpers need to be both "Slave" or use no jumpers at all?
 
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haioko

haioko

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Dec 28, 2013
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It doesn't really matter. They're going to be accessed through the SATA drive. Realistically those jumpers were only used when you had exclusively only IDE drives and therefore you had to distinguish between which drive would be your main master drive with OS etc and the slave one which would be backups etc. You don't need to distinguish between the two as they're neither master or slave drives now. It'll be like putting two flash drives in to your pc, they'll come up as storage devices, your computer doesn't need to know which one to access first.
 
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