Christer Edwards wrote:
> Afternoon,
> 
> Santa was nice to me this year and I found myself the proud new owner
> of a 500G WD  (WD5000KS WD Caviar SE16) hard drive.  It turns out,
> however, that the drive uses SATA and my machines use PATA.  I'm not
> up-to-date on my hardware definitions so this is what I *believe* is
> the situation.  Bottom line they use different connections and I can't
> connect the thing to any of my machines.
> 
> Could anyone that is a little more up-to-date on hardware give me some
> tips?  Should I just go pick up a PCI SATA controller and connect it
> that way?  If so are there any restrictions on where I can use it?
> ie; will the controller recognize the drive no matter the size or am I
> also restricted on the size the BIOS will recognize?  I was actually
> planning on putting it in a fairly old machine that I use as a media
> server.  Or, should I return this drive and get one that is more
> immediately compatible with my machine?

I'd go ahead and get a SATA-150 controller. NewEgg.com has some nice, cheap
ones. I like this one and have installed about a dozen of them.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816132006

Even if your drive is a SATA-II (SATA-300) drive, the cost of adding a
SATA-II controller is still a leap more than SATA-I (SATA-150).

Since the bottleneck isn't really the controller as much as the mechanics of
the hard drives themselves, I don't think you're going to see much of a
difference in data throughput between SATA-150 and SATA-300 in most cases.
Not until drives start spinning faster or something, anyway.

-=Fozz

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