im maing a new pc on thursday and im keeping my old hard drive which is pata and im also putting a new one in whicgh is sata, will this be compatible?
No rom drives are ata33... pata. It will be fine to run a sata drive and a pata drive at the same time.
Everything will work fine. But, please note, the eVGA motherboard your looking at only supports one ATA channel. Meaning, you will have to run your HDD on the same channel as your optical drive.
On the motherboard there are usually two ide channels.... ie places to plug the long ide ribbon cables into. One called Primary IDE and the other Secondary IDE..... http://www.avault.com/hardware/images/fc875p12a.jpg People usually put the rom drives on one channel and the harddrives on the other. You only have one channel so you will have to put the harddrive on the same ribbon cable as the rom drive. http://freepctech.com/pc/001/images/hd10.jpg Its not a common way to hook up your components but it shouldnt cause you any problems. I think the main reason people avoid doing it is because many people think that the drives can only run as fast as the slowest drive on the channel... ie 33mb/s (rom drives are ata33) but this isnt the case. Well, Ive had one drive running at ata100 and another at ata133 both on the same channel.
