IDE to SATA II, how?

My 3-year old computer decided to call it quits 2 days ago, I suspect the motherboard finally died as I had some weird USB and LAN problems with it earlier already. Could be the power supply as well, but I don't think so as the motherboard LED is on but the processor or hard disks get no power. It's a sockel 754 system so changing just the board is out of question. I have to buy a whole new system very soon; I was considering it anyway so no big damage done.

I have all important data (and especially savegames) on 2 old IDE hard drives and I should transfer the files to a new system with a SATA II hard drive; the new motherboard I'm looking at (XFX 680i SLI) has an IDE connector on it. Question: can I plug in the IDE and SATA drives simultaneously (the DVD-recorders would be on SATA as well)? Or should I get an IDE-to-SATA adapter I have seen for sale somewhere? Or is there an even easier way via USB? It is not a big deal if I have to throw the old drives away, I just need the contents.

Just plug the old drives into the IDE connector and if you don't need the IDE connector for your DVD-drives just keep the old drives there.

You should have no problems -- just plug in both drives and move the stuff over. You can certainly have both IDE and SATA devices plugged in at the same time.

(Another option is to get a cheap external USB hard drive enclosure for IDE drives and transfer over the stuff that way. Might be worth it if you have a use for an external drive, e.g. as off-site back-up.)

OK, thanks for really fast replies! So far no need for a portable hard drive, usually a USB stick does the trick

MasterLich said:

OK, thanks for really fast replies! So far no need for a portable hard drive, usually a USB stick does the trick

Click to expand...

Don't you have more then 4GB that you want to transfer? I mean that this is the main reason why I got myself an external disk drive: backup.

Bartacus said:

Don't you have more then 4GB that you want to transfer? I mean that this is the main reason why I got myself an external disk drive: backup.

Click to expand...

Well, no. All my attempts at writing novels have resulted in documents smaller than 1 GB so far. Maybe one day with 512-bit Windows and Word 2027

Also, I have never had a hard disk failure... and I have all the files that I consider really important at work, where backup is done automatically every day.