mixing sata and ata drives

I'm so new I'm not even sure this question is in the right place. I click on new topic and get 'submit your reply' form!
Anyway just in case there's somebody out there who sees this 'reply' which is really a question..
I have a Dell Dimension 4600 Pentium 4 with an 80GB ATA Maxtor drive which is nearly full.
I would like to transition everything to a new 500GB SATA (Seagate or W Digital) and keep the old 80GB as extra storage.
a) Can I mix & match an SATA drive and ATA drive on the same computer? The mother board does have two SATA connectors available.
b) The existing power supply has extra power cables but they are the same as the ATA power source. I thought SATA needed different power cabel connectors? (there is one extra power connector with 8 wires also but more squarish than rectangular (how non-technical can one get!!)
Keeping fingers crossed.
Dennis
dseisunh@hydrocolloid.com

thank you rr. do these adapters usually come with the sata drive or do I have to order separately? in which case, where?
I've been reading about so many problems in moving stuff (including boot sequence) to a new hard disk, I'm really nervous.

Quick note: If this is below your level, I apologize. I don't know where you're at, so-to-speak.

If you're nervous about transferring your O/S and data... don't. The reasons for transferring are:
1) better performance. If you're happy on a P4, you probably aren't super-concerned about it.
2) reliability concerns. If this is an issue, consider getting a backup utility so that you can migrate the complete image over to your SATA drive.

But if there's no reason to move your O/S off of your 80 GB drive, then just leave it where it is. Move your data over (in particular, check your "My Documents" folder under c:\documents and settings\) to the new drive, and there you go.

Things to look out for:
1) You'll need to make sure that the motherboard and O/S think the new drive is just an IDE drive; or, you'll need to install device drivers for it. I'm guessing you don't want to mess around with device drivers, so when your computer boots go into the Setup (Fn-F2, or just F2, I think) and check whether there's anything about SATA mode, IDE vs. SATA, RAID, or AHCI. If one of the options is IDE, set it to that.
2) you may be able to use the IDE power connector you already have on the SATA drive. Some SATA drives have both connector types, some don't. My WDs have both.
3) Make sure you're running XP with SP2. With just XP, you may find that the O/S will only "see" 139 GB on your new drive.

A couple of other things you can do to make your system run faster once the new drive is on it:
1) move your pagefile (pagefile.sys) over to the new drive. To do this, you have to set the virtual memory pagefile size to 0 (do this by right-clicking My Computer, select properties. The settings in there), and then set it to be a reasonable size, but now on your D (or E, whichever it ends up being) drive, instead of your C drive. You'll have to reboot in the middle.
2) move your temp directory over to your new drive. To do this, make a new directory on your new drive (e.g. D:\TEMP). Then go to environment variables and point the TEMP and TMP environment variables at the new folder. There are both system- and user-level parameters for these, so don't forget to migrate both.

You'll have some reconfig work getting all of your programs to look at the new drive instead of the old... but the performance benefits will be worth it. Good luck!

RR thank you for the link. I'll get one of these cables if the WDigital drive doesn't accept the standard power supply.
TMedia - thank you. Nothing is 'beneath my level'. I'll try & follow your instructions.
G-paw not sure which jumper and what connector could be 1.5 but will check hdd website when I get the hdd

The connectors on the mobo could very well SATA 1.5 connector on the mobo and a new drive will be SATA 3.0, the jumper is just a little piece of plastic that fits over 1 pins. Acronis True Image 11 will do this but create a separate partition for it, at least I like to keep images on separate partition

I am curious myself on that one…

I have never seen a SATA drive with the old Molex connector.

I think I found one the Western Digital Caviar se16
Found confirmation at
http://www.hothardware.com/article [...] _SATA_HDD/
Ordered it on Amazon.com for $119.99 Seemed to have a pretty good write-up. Plus it seems like the boxed version & not oem.
Now for the scary part of installing it!!