Don't see any parallel ports

[davejohnson]

Hey, I pretty much bought a whole new system, motherboard, psu ect. But just kept my older Harddrive because don't really need a new one. Anyway, so I have the motherboard and everything setup. Except I can't see any parallel IDE ports to connect my older harddrives to. Is it hidden or something? Heres the motherboard I got. http://www.directcanada.com/products/?sku=11830BD5085&vpn=GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3&manufacture=GIGABYTE

If there is no slot, am I able to buy an adapter? or am I forced to go get a new hard drive?

 

[the great randini]

proactive
Definition
pro·ac·tive[ prō áktiv ]
1. taking initiative: taking the initiative by acting rather than reacting to events

reactive
Definition
re·ac·tive[ ree áktiv ]
1. reacting: tending to react to events and situations rather than initiating or instigating them

 

[willard]

Get a new hard drive. PATA is twenty six years old, and SATA has been available for almost a decade. Get with the times, man. Newer hard drives will be much, much faster, have several times more storage and aren't very expensive.

 

[po1nted]

PATA hasn't been supported in years. There may be motherboards out there, but they are probably few and far between with very limited functionality in terms of new technology.

There are solutions that would allow you to connect your drives, but they are not optimal, to say the least. What you want to do is look for SATA drives, not PATA drives when you upgrade.

Here are some solutions that might allow you to connect your PATA drives for data transfer to new a new solution:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002OV1VJW/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B003AG79GO&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1JHAK86M10W338ACX6MF

But now, I would not run the PATA drives other than to get your data off them. Their meant time to fail is most likely approaching. Best to invest in the future!

 

[willard]

I would very strongly recommend not screwing with any adapters or such nonsense aside from just recovering data. PATA is beyond dead, and there is absolutely no good reason to continue using such old, outdated drives. If your hard drives were people, they'd be in high school or college by now. You could probably buy a single SATA drive for $100 that has more capacity than all your PATA drives combined.

Is it really so unreasonable to spend a hundred bucks on updating your storage once a decade?

 

[ram1009]

Dump the old HDD. If nothing else, it is too old to be considered reliable.

 

[Branden]

IDE is dead and gone, davejohnson, get a new SATA HDD or SSD (you should replace your HDD's every 5 years anyways, the older a HDD is the more likely it is to fail)

good thing you didn't also intend on salvaging your SD RAM, AGP video card and floppy drive from your old machine...