SATA and PATA. Real daft question

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Hello everyone, and to everbody in the UK, I hope you are enjoying this festering cat-shite weather as much as I am

I have what appears to be an overly complex question which probably has a real simple answer

Bascially, do motherboards have the capability to run both PATA and SATA hard drives?

Reason: I'm looking to buy a new HDD soon, never done so before and never installed one. Now the two drives I have at the moment run on PATA, which so I thought was the norm for my motherboard

My motherboard is a KT600-A, designer for AMD Athlon, Athlon XP and Duron, bought in 2003

So before buying, I checked my motherboard book just to be sure, and it has a big section about installing SATA HDDs!!!

Also, looking at the diagram (attached) it appears to have two SATA controllers (bottom right)

I restarted the PC and checked the boot screens, and a piece of dialogue came up saying

Via Technologies Inc. VIA VT8237 Serial ATA RAID BIOS Setting Utility V2.21

Serial_CH0 Master: No Device
Serial_CH1 Master: No Device

There was also a listing under Integrated Peripherals as

Onchip SATA Device

Does this mean that all this time I have been running drives on PATA without needing too?

Any help gratefully appreciated guys, this just threw me a bit as I have never really looked for this kind of thing before

Thanks

 

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yup im running 2 SATA drives in RAID 0 with a PATA drive as a back up. you'll just have to adjust the boot order depending on which drives the o/s is installed on.

grim

 

short answer: yes! Its entirely possible for a MOBO to have SATA and IDE controllers (Most modern MOBO's tend to have at least one IDE controller.

 

Bloody hellfire!!!! So this whole time I've been running PATA without realising I could do SATA

Strewth, ah well, makes it a lot easier to choose a drive now!!

Thanks chaps

What I'll probably do is wipe my existing 40GB PATA drive and use that purely for an OS and buy a brand spanking new SATA for files and programmes then

Brill, I'm happy now

 

First, make sure your mobo supports SATA... that you verify it with your own two eyes rather than rely on a manual. Sometimes there are several versions of the same mobo... some with video and some without, some with audio and some without, some with network support and some without. It's entirely possible there's a version of the board with/without SATA.

Second, be sure you can use both PATA and SATA on your motherboard simultaneously. I've seen some people complain that their PATA controller becomes disabled when their SATA controller is enabled... and they had to either flash their BIOS (if that was even an option) they had to invest in a SATA optical device (CD/DVD), or change their mobo entirely.

 

Thanks chap. I'll take a look at the old beaut at the weekend. I would have thought it was enabled to some degree though if the boot screen is bringing up dialogue about the serial channels having no devices.

Ah well, trial and error, you can't learn better than that!

 

Me too I ran both PATA and SATA on at the same time before. So yes it should work, also like BM said check to make sure the mobo is compatible.

 

if all else fails just buy a converter

grim