Ide To Sata Adapters & Power Cable Splitters

To say SATA drives will not be faster then PATA is.. Well most likely wrong. While I agree that a hard drive is not likely to live up to the full speed of a PATA bus (although I don't know the details), what I can tell you is that PATA provides a shared bus where SATA does not. This means that only one drive can be accessed at a time via PATA if both drives are on the same bus. From the OS both drives appear to be openly accessable simultaneously, your speed will drop in half when you use them at the same time on PATA because the OS has to balance read/write back and forth between each one. SATA does not have this issue as each wire on a sata controller represents a different SATA bus.

Also, although hard drives are the bottleneck of IO, two ways to speed them up are to invest in drives with a faster RPM and to invest into a RAID controller. Don't be fooled by motherboards that say they come with them because 99.9% that do have a "half" raid controller which is heavily dependent on software drivers and therefor not performing true RAID. Get a 3ware (now owned by LSI) 9650 or 9690 (I use both on servers I run) and setup a raid 5 or raid 6 controller between 3 or more drives. With RAID 5 you will have a speed increase as a multiple of the number of drives you have minus 1, I.E. 3 drives = twice as fast, 5 drives = 4 times as fast ...Approx, I should say almost that speed but not quite and not noticable enough for you to care. Also RAID 0 is faster but if a single disk fails on RAID 0 then all data becomes inaccessible. RAID 5 can support a minimum of 3 drives and has a total capacity of number of drives minus 1. So RAID 5 3 250GB drives will give you what appears as a single disk of 500GB. Raid 6 uses double parity and will give you a total capacity of number of drives minus 2 so 4 250GB drives on RAID gives you a total capacity of 500GB. RAID 6 needs at least 4 drives. Both of those 3ware controllers are hot swappable and just a couple nights ago I had to replace a hard drive on a RAID 6 file server. I removed the bad drive while the OS was running and put a new one in and the RAID controller rebuilt the missing data on the new drive and the OS never flinched or new that a drive was removed.

Last thing to keep in mind, with RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and maybe more, any disk is only seen as big as the smallest disk on the system so if you have a RAID 5 with a 100GB disk, 250GB disk, 500GB disk and 1TB disk, the RAID controller will only use the 100GB of each disk and will give you a total capacity of 300GB or 3 x 100GB with 1 disk size worth of data use for parity.

My old laptop is broken, motherboard is broken. I would like to find the way to transfer all my files from my old laptop hard disc to my new laptop. How can I do it? 

I have a compaq presario 6330ca with a maxtor 160GB Ide,running Vista and Windows 7,also just installed my other drive (sata)Maxtor 160 was used for storage on anther machine, I now want to run this sata drive as a linux machine after formatting. Will I have to disconnect one drive I.E the ide to run linux. Thank you..