Opinions please for HDD connections to mobo

[Wandering one]

I just put a Sandisk Extreme Pro SSD in my wife's laptop, the worst of that being I DON"T HAVE ONE .
I have 5 SATA connections on my MoBo and all are presently used with 3 spinners and 2 optical drives.
My thought is to move one or both of the optical drives to the IDE header, to free up a SATA cable for the SSD that I need, want, have to have.
Any forseen problems with this ?

Art.

 

[TVeblen]

The first problem would be if the optical drives only have SATA ports. You can add a SATA to IDE converter cable to the mix, but that could complicate things.

After figuring out how to connect the optical drive to the IDE header there should be no problem using the drives. Optical drives are way too slow for SATA anyway.

The only other problem I recall is that you could have problems getting the optical drive to boot first in that configuration. If this was the case you could easily work around by using the Boot Menu (this is on systems where you can press a key at boot to get a list of drives that you can boot from) when you needed to boot from the optical drive.

 

[strollin]

If you have any PCI slots available in your system you could add a card with more SATA ports.

If any of your hdds are smaller, you might consider getting a larger drive that would let you consolidate 2 drives into 1 which would free up a SATA port.

Another alternative is to eliminate one of the optical drives. Not sure how often you use 2 optical drives, most systems only have a single optical drive and many newer systems don't have any.

 

[Wandering one]

Thank you both for the confirmation. I know that at least one drive can go to IDE. As for boot I have always left the HDD first and used selective boot depending on DVD, or a really great do it all set up on a YUMI stick.
Art.

 

[GokAy]

... or a really great do it all set up on a YUMI stick.

YUMI Multiboot USB sure is a great tool.

 

[AddRAM]

I would just loose an optical drive, I used to use 2 in the past, but there`s no real reason to have 2 anymore

But if you can just switch one to ide, just do that and you`ll loose nothing but some speed.