Converting an IDE HD Mass Storage to SATA Storage in Linux
- When Is It Time to Change?
- My Mistakes
- Dealing with the Cable Issue
- Installing the New Drives
- The Transfer from IDE to SATA
- Making a Backup
- Wrap It Up
- SATA: Serial ATA hard drive interface standard
- IDE (or ATA): Integrated Drive Electronics hard drive interface standard
Why SATA instead of IDE?
The IDE/ATA HD interface has served us a long time. Unfortunately, even with the evolution of the standard over the years, it's run out of steam. IDE is limited—even with round/shielded cables—to about 150 Mb/second. So why SATA (Serial ATA) rather than IDE? Because the SATA-II standard is good for 300.
When Is It Time to Change?
I changed to SATA because whenever I went over two-thirds of my HD space, there was no longer enough free space to generate a dar DVD backup set (which requires about half the space occupied by my current data). I went from 160G to 400G drives, which should be big enough so that I won't have to do this again for a while. This also seemed a pretty good price point—the drives are $85 each from newegg. Significantly larger means a very significantly larger price, and smaller drives don't cost all that much less.