Do I get any performance boost with an IDE to SATA adapter?

Question

I picked up a barebones PC kit the other day so that I could get a speed boost and still use my old hard drives/DVD drives, etc.

I currently have two IDE drives and unfortunately the new motherboard only has 1 IDE head to plug into (and I fear I have now showed my age on my last home built PC). Since I need to keep a functioning DVD-RW drive, this means that I will have to lose one of the hard drives.

However, there is a SATA port on the motherboard and I saw that they sell adapters that will allow the IDE drive to plug in and function off the IDE port.

It isn't critical that I have both drives up and running, but if I can get some extra boost out of running the old hard drive through the SATA port, I could see it being worthwhile. Will I get any kind of performance boost by installing the old hard drive this way?

Answer 1

There's no real advantage. The bootleneck will be moved to the EIDE drive interface which, as you know limits your hard drive bandwidth to the ATA specification you see on the drive label.

However, being that the motherboard offers a SATA controller, you will gain a performance boost if you buy a SATA disk for it. At the current prices, you can get SATA disks cheaper than ATA ones.

Answer 2

Definitely no performance increase. The only advantage is being able to utilize your old drive internally.

It shouldn't have much negative performance impact either.

As an alternative, consider getting a cheap external USB enclosure for the old IDE drive, and a new SATA drive to install internally for performance. Naturally you'll see the biggest performance gains by moving your boot partition to the SATA drive.