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Re: [LUG] Upgrading Missus' Hard drive

 

On Mon, 5 Oct 2009, george parker wrote:

On Sunday 04 October 2009, Rob Beard wrote:
Henry Bremridge wrote:
Running ubuntu, she has an Hitachi IDE ATA hard-drive (160GB) and needs
some more space..

In googling:
- SATA disks seem to be larger for the same price than than ATA disks
- SATA disks require
        - An appropriate motherboard
        - Or an ATA PCI Card (£30 from Maplin, £16 from Dabs, £5 from Amazon)
        - Or an SATA to ATA connector

Then I saw this

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Port-Expansion-VIA-VT6421a-chipset/dp/B000S87GG0
4 Port SATA PCI Expansion Card &IDE VIA VT6421a chipset (3 Sata plus IDE)
for £10

Which I figured I could plug into a spare slot, and add the new SATA
drive

Question

1/ Has anyone used one of these things before, can anyone see any
problems?

Not used a PCI SATA card myself before but being a VIA chipset I'd say
it should be fairly well supported.

2/ Any opinions on having SATA and IDE in one ubuntu machine?

I bought a new Asus mother board and SATA drive recently.  After getting it
all up and running I plugged in a PATA drive to transfer stuff from my old
Home directory.  The mobo recognised both drives but insisted on trying to
boot from the PATA drive.  I fiddled with the bios but as far as it was
concerned if you have a pata drive fitted, it ignores any SATA drives.  There
are 3 options to boot sequence; removeable device, CD rom and hard drive.
The hard drive is selected by the BIOS and it selects pata if one is fitted.
There may be a way around this but I fitted the pata drive to another machine
to get the info off.

There's usually a 2nd option to let you select which hard drive to boot from. Sometimes you need to set it, save the config, then reset the computer rather than just exiting the BIOS though. I've built many Asus based systems over the years like this.

Gordon
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