Over the years, I have certainly used my fair share of converters. From POST test cards to PCI-based IDE controllers for people who did not wish to spring for a new motherboard, I’ve used them all.

Today however, I am facing a challenge of a slightly different variety. On my Windows box, I am currently using one 40 GB drive as the master and a 200 GB drive for the slave. I plan on replacing my 40 GB drive with a new 300 GB Seagate Barracuda drive running off of my SATA controller. Now here is where it gets a little bit interesting…

I have decided that I will continue usage of the IDE slave drive. After all, it’s a perfectly good hard drive. But now I am faced with deciding on using a decent adapter or instead, slapping them together as they are; which leaves me with lamer performance on the IDE slave drive. So this begs the question: Should I even bother to use a SATA adapter? Could it really do anything worthwhile for those of us who have no intention of dumping all of our old IDE hard drives?

It’s wild, but I am pretty much rolling with the punches on this one. Since my motherboard appears to support running my SATA drive as the primary and the older IDE drive as a secondary, it seems that I do have a couple of options to choose from.

Maybe I should just forget it and dump the IDE drive completely? After all, I do have some external drives that I could use if needed. I’ll keep you posted as to how this “epic struggle” works out in the end. That’s all for now, see you tomorrow!

[tags]external drive,hard drive,controller,sata,ide drive,upgrades[/tags]