sata and regular ata drive compatability

[everthefool]

I have a sata hard drive as my primary hard drive and i wanted to make my regular ata hard drive the slave. when i tried installing the slave into the primary ide port it didn't work and it disabled my dvd drive which is in the secondary ide port. i checked the bios and my sata hard drive is in the 3rd primary slot and after my dvd drive and my disk drive. the only way i was able to get my slave drive to work was to plug it into the secondary port on my dvd drive and keep the primary connection on my dvd drive in the secondary ide slot. does this have something to do with the sata and regular ata drive compatability? or is the primary slot on my ide port just not working? if not, how can i get my sata drive into the primary slot? because when i check the bios it doesn't allow for it. so right now i have the drive installed but there's nothing in the primary slot. can i switch the sata drive to the primary slot somehow? thanks.

[RJ]

Hello and welcome to PC Mech.

What board and OS do you have ? With Win9x it can be that SATA disables one of the parallel ATA ports (depends on the board. . I'm not sure if every board does that).
Also why did you set your hard drive to "slave" ? Is there a master present ? If there is no master present, set it to master.

RJ

[everthefool]

i have windows xp, and yes there is a master it's the sata hard drive.

[RJ]

No the SATA hard drive can't be the master coz SATA only supports one hard drive per channel, and thus eliminates the master/slave setting altogether. So there is no master. A master can only be on the same IDE channel. Set your hard drive to master then.

RJ

[everthefool]

Thanks. I'll try that. another question: right now my new hard drive will not fit in it's regular slot because of a messy cable situation. so i have it in the aluminum casing and sitting on top of the cd-rom drive in my case. my case has six fans but none are directly blowing at it. the power supply fan that sucks in air is directly next to it and is bringing some air on it. do you think i need to worry about overheating? generally my whole case runs fairly cool... just no direct fan on it.

[RJ]

A device does not need a fan blowing cool air on it. . . well, except the video chip and the CPU itself, which already come with a fan.
6 case fans is IMHO a total overkill. I for example have only 1 case fan, and the temps are ok.
So you are the last one on this planet who should worry about overheating

RJ

[everthefool]

thanks. that puts my mind at rest.

[Mesaeus]

You can use an utility like SpeedFan to keep an eye on the hard disk temperature, just about about any modern hard disk has a temp sensor. My Maxtor 80Gig PATA for example goes from 35 to 41 degrees celsius, depending on the hard drive activity. I'd say anything under 50 degrees is still doable, anything under 40 degrees is very good.

[everthefool]

thanks i'll try that

[Frey Grimrod]

Just keep in mind that HDD's dont tend to play terribly nice with powersupplies its its over ontop of the CD Drive like you say its probably fine but I wouldnt put it ontop of the powersupply personally...