one IDE header

[ted]

Just found your site. Thank you for the very good, and easily understood information.

This will be my first build. I would like to move the two IDE hard drives from my old system to the new system.

The motherboards, like the MSI K9N Platinum SLI, have one IDE header. If I use that for my HDDs, where will the DVD RW connect?

Thank you for your assistance.

Ted

[DemonicDerek]

get Sata its better fgor hard drives.

[Rob]

Hi, Ted. Thanks and welcome!

You raise a good point. Often when you're making an new build, you'd like to bring over your old hard drive as at least a data hard drive. But with new motherboards only providing one IDE header, you're stuck. The one IDE header should probably be used for optical drives, which should not be shared with hard drives due to the performance limitation - and probably because you may already have two optical drives.

One suggestion is you could put your old IDE hard drive into an enclosure and connect it to your new computer via the USB or Firewire port. Usually the new hard drive in your new computer is vast in size, compared to the old hard drive. So you could even copy your entire old hard drive to the new hard drive in its own folder. That's what I usually do. I mention a hard drive enclosure on this page.
http://www.mysuperpc.com/build/pc_install_firewire_usb20.shtml

Another option is to use one of the internal slot to add an IDE card and install your old hard drive internally.

[ted]

I think I might have found a solution. I found a Lite-on SATA DVD burner. This should allow me to put both HDDs on the one IDE header. (The old HDDs are only a year old, and of good quality, so I don't think I'm going to gain that much by switching to a SATA harddrive.)

Do you have any experience with the SATA DVD burner?

Ted

[Rob]

No, I don't. Let us know what you think of it.