Turning on SATA support on already running system

[sabka]

I have a Albatron KX18D Pro II mobo and till now, just used the PATA hard disks with SATA disabled.

I'm going to start upgrading the system over the next 6 months (due to lack of $-flow) and wanted to upgrade my SLAVE hard drives to larger capacities first (a few 500GB'ers would do) - SATA would be the obvious choice for future-proofing.

Can i just turn on the SATA support on the mobo and plug in additional SATA drives? Is that going to make my PATA not work anymore? Or can they both run simultaneously?

 

[DaveSimmons]

You might need to go into the BIOS to adjust the boot order if it tries to boot from SATA instead of PATA, other than that no worries.

 

[PowerEngineer]

I just went through the same exercise (on a four-year-old Gigabyte motherboard) and had few problems. You should make sure that you have all the updated drivers for your set-up before you start.

Seagate and Western Digital (and probably others too) include software to support the addition of their SATA drives to existing systems. In my case, BIOS support for SATA was already "on" and the motherboard picked up the new drive as soon as it was plugged in. The WD SATA software allowed me to designate the new SATA drive as my boot drive, copied over the boot partition from my old drive, and changed its designation to C: drive for me.

I disconnected the old drive (for failure recovery) and then used the system with just the SATA drive for a few weeks just to be extra safe. I've now turned my two old 40 GB IDE drives into a mirrored IDE RAID for storing important files.

Good luck!