Question about IDE, SATA, and old motherboards

[nanatsu]

Okay I have some parts lying around and I thought I might mess around and build another box out of them. The plan is to go with what I have for now and to slowly upgrade it over time. I'm doing this so I can learn more about upgrading and building my own computers and things.

Right now I have an old ECS P4VXASD2+ motherboard. It's not very good but it was cheap at the time. It basically comes with 2 IDE slots, but I have an SATA hard drive lying around. Is there anyway to connect the hard drive through one of the IDE slots? If not, is there any way at all to use an SATA hdd with this kind of motherboard until I can purchase a better one?

[Sylvane]

Re: Question about IDE, SATA, and old motherboards

Amazon.com: sata to ide adapter

might give you a place to start

[KingOfZeal]

Re: Question about IDE, SATA, and old motherboards

In this case, yes it's possible. If that's what you're aiming for (just to see if something works and to get it to work) then it's all well and good.

However, I would suggest that one of your first upgrades be the mobo: it doesn't have to be expensive to handle SATA these days, just has to be current. I think I can pick up a SATA-capable board down at the local shop for $20 easy. It won't have anything incredibly good about it (onboard audio/video, limited slots, low-ish performance chipset), but it will be able to handle it.

Also, just because the hard drive can connect doesn't mean the machine will work -- make sure the board has the right processor socket to put whatever you want into it. Though I can't remember off the top of my head, I'm tempted to say that modern CPUs (especially duel- and quad-cores) use a different socket than pre-SATA CPUs. Upon a little bit of research, Duel cores are socket 775 (and T and P), Pentium 4s are Socket 775 (and 423 and 478, so it's likely to depend on model) and Pentium 3s are socket 370. SATA came out in 2003, and P4s were released beginning 2000... P3s would probably not work well on a SATA board in this case. You could also run into trouble if you're dealing with AMDs, but since I don't have much experience with their modern chips, I won't get into that.

Though, all the above was completely off-topic from the original question.

[nanatsu]

Re: Question about IDE, SATA, and old motherboards

Yes the motherboard would be the first thing I look into upgrading. The processor I have right now is a P4. But since I want to eventually make this into a nice system, I don't want to upgrade until I can find a reasonably priced nice mb that can handle quad/duo core/pentium for future updates. Not looking to spend more than $150 on a mb. Since I already have a mb that can run with a P4, I thought I'd just use it for now.