Adding an old hard drive.

[pedroo]

Hi, I recently purchashed a Mesh elite inspiration 7500 pc and I am very pleased with it. I wish to add a hard drive from my old pc to my set-up in order to access photos and music from it. This barracuda HDD was connected with an IDE cable and I have a few questions.
1. The new HDD is connected by a SATA cable, can I use the IDE cable from my old pc to connect to the IDE channel on my new motherboard (an ASUS P5N-MX)?
2. Would I have to alter the BIOS in order to do this?

I am a bit of a noob at this but I'm willing to learn!

Thanks in advance

Pete

[ritchie]

just plug your old ide drive into the ide slot on your motherboard it should have one you will probably have an old power connector on your PSU so should work just fine on your new pc

[Eejit]

Hi Pedroo,
Wou will be fine with connecting with the IDE cable. As ritchie said, you will probably find a molex connector for the power supply spare.
As to the BIOS, I doubt you will have to go into there unless you need to change the boot order.

[steve foley]

I have 4 old HDDs, one I use for Back-up. I connected those to my new Mesh PC by using "Caddies" with USB connection to make them external HDDs. They are connected via a USB Hub. I also added an external 3.5 " diskette drive as I have various legacy files on these and the new PC didn't have one fitted. These augment the two 500Gb HDDs fitted to the PC so I am not short of storage. These external HDDs have the own power supplies and they do not seem to slow down my PC to any appreciable extent. Vista picked them up as plug and play devices, and they are seen by the BIOS.