Using sata and ide drives, question.

[flapster]

This is a noob question and I should probably just test it out myself, but since my parts havent arrived yet I'll ask it before hand.

My primary OS drive will be a 500GB SATA drive, I'll be using a 200GB IDE drive for extra storage. Do I need to set the IDE drive as a slave, or does it even matter? Or will my bios always the first SATA drive as the primary?

Thanks

 

[Vertigo Acid]

Will your IDE drive be on the same channel as an optical drive or not? The SATA drive doesn't have anything to do with whether you need to set your IDE drive as master or slave. Boot order is set in BIOS independent of Master/Slave or Primary/Secondary

 

[Nenu]

Set the drive to master if you have a DVD drive on the same cable or no jumper (standalone master) if it is alone on the cable.
There may only be a master setting which is used for all cases.
If your DVD drive is on the same cable (as the IDE drive), set that to Slave.

As Vertigo said, set the boot order in the CMOS.

You may get better performance copying data off your DVD drive to the IDE drive if the DVD is put on a different ribbon cable.

 

[flapster]

My optical drives will be SATA as well. So i'll just set the IDE HDD to master and make sure its booting off of the SATA drive in the bios.

Thanks