I just got two 200GB harddrives for christmas. Unfortunately my HP case only provided for one harddrive and I don't want to bother with copying all my stuff to CDs then to the new ones, and I don't believe I was ever given my copy of XP so I won't have an OS. ANyways, will ATA hard drives work with a new computer that I'm planning to build? or would that require solely on the hardware involved? I'm not too familiar with the acronyms but I believe that SATA is the newer version of harddrive stuff, that's why I'm asking. Plus I got them for $20 each, maybe that was why they were so cheap. Ramble ramble, etc. Thank you.
It depends on the mother board, some ave PATA connection other only have one. as for the hp you have now all you would have to do is remove the CD/dvd and install the new harddrive and have a program that will clone the old drive to the new one.
So I guess I should just go poke around on newegg and see what I can find as far as motherboards go?
SATA is serial and PATA is parallel.
Serial communications used to be very slow so they went to a parallel architecture which allowed multiple serial channels to be used at the same time. There is a lot of overhead with PATA and these days serial is so fast that the overhead becomes a bottleneck. Firewire (1394) and USB are also serial and quite fast.
I doubt you will find a new MoBo without SATA but even the newest boards usually still have one PATA chain for two devices. This is mainly for legacy optical drive support.
You can also pick up a PCI ATA controller which will take up a PCI slot but give you another 4 possible drives.
Serial communications used to be very slow so they went to a parallel architecture which allowed multiple serial channels to be used at the same time. There is a lot of overhead with PATA and these days serial is so fast that the overhead becomes a bottleneck. Firewire (1394) and USB are also serial and quite fast.
I doubt you will find a new MoBo without SATA but even the newest boards usually still have one PATA chain for two devices. This is mainly for legacy optical drive support.
You can also pick up a PCI ATA controller which will take up a PCI slot but give you another 4 possible drives.