Mixing IDE and SATA drives

[JMFD]

Hey all,
After a while my old PC has finally died - PSU issues and mobo issues mean its not worth running as a backup PC anymore with the power shorting out every hour or so.

But, was wondering what to do regarding the hard drives. It has 2 standard maxtor IDE hard drives I'd like the data from. My current PC is running from a single SATA drive.

Is mixing SATA/IDE drives a good idea? Is it insanely complicated? What do I need to do with jumpers? Would I be better off just getting an external caddy?

Mobo is:
ASRock ConroeXFire-eSATA2

Cheers!

[mac124]

External caddy is the best bet though you could try running them off of the ide connector on the mobo (i am guessing it has at least one) though this is usually reserved for optical drives and some can be funny when using hdd's on them.

The other option is to buy an ide controller card and fit that in a pci slot on the mobo.

[Barley]

I agree with Mac, usually running IDE and SATA drives together is absolutely no problem, but the board you have there only has one courtesy IDE port, which I'm quite sure will only exist for the purpose of attaching optical drives.

I'd consider an IDE controller as well.

[JMFD]

Thanks both, I'll check the rig again tonight and figure out if I can cope with a PCI slot being used by an IDE controller.