There are adapters made by several manufacturers that
will convert between PATA and SATA. You could use
one of those to connect your PATA drive to the SATA
controller. If your PC's PCI Express bus is backward
compatible with PCI, another alternative is to get a PCI
card with an ATA controller on it. You can get those
from Promise, SIIG, HighPoint, etc.

*TimDaniels*


"Fixer" wrote:
plus you could also by an external usb2 HDD enclosure

"Tom Scales" wrote:
If you only have one optical drive, the IDE drive can go
on that. If it only has one connector, then, yes, a cable
with two connectors is all you need.

"Doug Miannay" wrote:
I guess that in my ignorance I ordered a configuration
where I can't add an IDE drive to the same cable as
the SATA drive. Am I correct? That poses a problem
for me... I'm going to have to find some other solution to
allow me to use the 160GB IDE drive I have all my data
on from the computer the XPS is replacing.

"WSZsr" wrote:
Are you talking about the IDE cable or the SATA cable.
The 74GB drive is not an IDE drive. It is a SATA drive
and it requires a SATA cable. If you order the retail
version of the drive, it will come with a SATA cable.

"Doug Miannay" wrote:
Quick question... I just purchased a new XPS Gen 3 (3.6)
with a single 74GB 10,000 RPM HD. I did not get a
second drive since I already have some large drives here
that I planned to add. Problem is since I only ordered the
computer with one drive, the primary IDE cable for the HD
only has a single connector. Is this typical? Can I just pick
up a standard two-connector IDE cable in order to add the
second drive?