ATA To SATA????

[f1oored]

OK I just got a new Abit NF7-S V2 as suggested by a brilliant techimoer (you know who you are). Anyhow, my new high speed mobo came with this little black box type thing that you plug into the back of a ATA hard drive. Then there is an SATA plug on the back of this little box.

In short, it has an ata to sata converter.

My question is, will this increase the transfer rate on the of the hard drive or is the only purpose to allow me to use the sata cable in place of the ide?

[Jeordiewhite]

It will not increase the speed, however sata has only seperate channels giving that advantage over having two drives on the same cable.
This is just to allow you to use pata drives maybe on the onboard serail ata raid mainly, however there are at times issues, you should likely be fine, but it can at times be incompatible.
Best to use serial ata tho, one nice thing is the air flow you get with sata since there aren't soo many cables in the way giving you a neater case.
Only if you want to use raid on existing drives would it be recommened, or just setup a drive on the controller with out the raid.
I personally use the serail ata raid with serial ata drives and wouldn't bother using the converter.

[Starfury_2260]

comes in handy if you need the ide cable to hook something up in the top drive bays and the 2nd connector on the cable wont reach while the 1st connector is plugged up to the hd.

[Yoda]

Same mobo (NF7-S V2.0), different question: I'm having 4 IDE drives and i want to add a new one ... can i use in the same time the Sata onboard connectors + Serillel2 & IDE connectors?