Yes, SATA is faster than IDE. It is the newer standard and should always be chosen over the older IDE connectors. While IDE offers data speed of up to 133 MB/s, SATA can transfer data at 6 Gb/s. Can a USB to SATA power a HDD? Firstly, open the external part of your computer or your computer case to get access to the motherboard and the hard drive connections. You may need a screwdriver or may not need You will feel when you will know about it that connecting the IDE hard drive to the SATA motherboard is a very easy task. It will take at most 10-20 minutes. Remember that the computer must be unplugged from any electrical connection. In a computer system, it's possible to have more than one harddrive. To connect multiple IDE drives, you need to chain the ribbon cables from one to the next. The computer system has no idea which is the main drive, from which to load the OS. Under Device Manager, look for specifications in storage menu. If it says S-ATA or Serial ATA, it’s SATA. For IDE devices, it can say EIDE or just IDE. Summing Up

USB ports can only deliver so much electricity to power portable HDDs, not regular HDDs. So, you will need to use a separate power adapter. How do I know if my HDD is SATA or IDE? SATA took off where ATA stopped as far as speed is concerned. The first generation of SATA was 1.2 Gbit/s (150 MB/s; note that MB is mega bytes and Gb is giga bits) similar to PATA/133. Today the third generation of SATA (3.0) (released on May 27, 2009), 6 Gbit/s (600 MB/s) hard drives and motherboards are being used. Then, to the hard drive connection point, attach the free end of the converter cable. Depending on the connection point, sometimes it will be necessary to attach the free end of the cable to the IDE cable. IDE Hard Drive: It is one of the most elements that’s needed. You know by now what IDE is. IDE hard drives are easily identifiable through their pin connection points usually. In most of the cases, the installation is by plugging it into the required component. It is needed to ensure a tight connection.

SATA consists of an 8 mm wide wafer connector on each end and the cable has a 7-pin connector, 3 grounds and 4 active data lines in two pairs. It has the facility to attach only one drive and so Serial ATA does away with Master/Slave configurations. Hard drives need a cable/connection for data and one for power. Parallel ATA only allows data cable lengths up to 18 in (457 mm) while SATA allows cable lengths up to 1 m (3.28 ft). eSATA cables can be 2 m in length. Great, Now we have a formatted SATA drive and a partition for OPL ready for games. Game Installation SATA has also done away with the master/slave configuration (technically, device 0 and device 1) used in IDE drives. With PATA (IDE), attaching two hard disks to the same channel required one to be set to be the master, the other the slave. For hardware, this usually meant setting the right jumper settings. While it is possible to make the necessary changes if drivers are required to run that type of drive it is a lot of messing around. Also if Windows has been loaded for more that 12 months it’s better to do a Clean Install so you can get rid of all the crud that clogs up the Registry.

SATA (right) and IDE (left) hard drives. The SATA hard drive has the data cable on the right and power cable on the left. The IDE data cable is ribbon-like (on the left) Moreover, the total switch from IDE to SATA doesn’t happen without issues sometimes. If you have an IDE hard drive but have a SATA motherboard, you can connect the drive to the motherboard still. This may be your reason for the conversion of IDE to SATA. Connecting the IDE Hard Drive to SATA Motherboard I personally feel that you should not ask this question at this moment of reading. After reading the advantages of SATA, you should know it by now why you need to connect to SATA. In modern times, there is no competition of SATA with IDE; SATA is always ahead of IDE.As for the TRIM I’m really not sure how it would impact with a SSD Drive it really all depends on the ChipSet of the M’Board. It may require a SATA or SSD driver so a straight “Clone” may not provide you with a bootable drive when you have finished the clone process removed the IDE drive and are trying to boot off the SSD. The data transfer rate of SATA connections is very fast compared to that of IDE connections. In fact, the main reason for SATA being used over IDE is because of the increased data transfer speeds of SATA connection hard drives. IDE has the capacity of data transfer speeds of 33/66/100/133 MB/second, whereas SATA is capable of 150/300/600 MBs/second. The differences in speed are due to the various versions and flavors of IDE and SATA.

But the SATA bus is a serial point-to-point bus, which means only one device can be connected on each channel. Many SATA drives can connect to the motherboard via multiple ports, and the drive to boot from is specified in the BIOS settings. If you closely examine all of the factors described above, you will see that the SATA drivers are better than PATA drivers in almost all aspects. Why Do You Need to Connect to SATA? Data transfer speed for IDE ranges from 5MB/s up to 133MB/s (ATA100/133). The parallel wire transfer mode reached its limit with the speed of 133 MB/s. Lastly, close your computer case. After plugging in power supply, boot your computer. There might be some last setup procedures that’ll take place at the time of the boot process, if either your IDE drive is somehow new or has no data stored on it. You should always follow any on-screen In most cases, no additional set up is usually necessary and you will find the drive simply available for storage use. SATA drives have an additional feature of Hot plugging which mean that even as the computer is running drives can be removed or added.IDE is the short form of ‘Integrated Drive Electronics’ which is actually an interface for connecting the processor and the drives. It should be clear, by interface I mean the way in which your computer and the hard drive is connected. This is also known as ATA or Parallel ATA. On each drive, IDE has its own controllers. So the drive can connect directly to the motherboard. The hard drives which have IDE connection have 8-pin or 24-pin connection usually that plugs into a slot on the motherboard directly. What is SATA? It may even work with a SATA Drive but not a SSD Drive as while these days they are interchangeable in the past they where not always so. Also the hardware always treats IDE Drives as the Default Master Drive and writes the Boot Loaded to that Drive so it’s important after the Clone to remove the IDE Drive before starting the system on the SSD Drive. SATA motherboard: As you know, SATA is the current standard for the connection of hard drive to the motherboard. This is obviously a replacement for the previous IDE connection. It is easily identifiable by the simple plug with only one connection point. SATA motherboards are more likely the present standards and are more efficient, faster, and more stable. Just my opinion though but look in the BIOS and see if there is an Option to make a SATA Drive the boot drive as that would remove the need for a Driver. You have to install the hard drive into an open hard drive area or bay. This depends on the type of computer case. It usually requires just a little sliding into an open bay and normally a very simple procedure.

The main motivation behind the creation of SATA was the increase in the drive speed. For, SATA connection hard drives are very fast. Advantages of SATAThere are four to six SATA connections usually in a normal motherboard which allows multiple SATA hard drives to hook up. The lower power consumption of SATA connection drives helps to keep the inner part of the computer case cooler and also reduces the power supply drain at a considerable range. The wide wire in IDE cables caused airflow problems inside the case. The narrower SATA cable allows free airflow inside the case.