hdd ide to sata; which way to go

[Stu]

	I'm glad you asked this question! I'm in the process of upgrading one
computer from an 80Gb EIDE to a 500Gb SATA, (Geeks.com had them on sale
for about $50) and I never thought to ask it myself. Of course, there
was also a day that I thought I'd *never* run out of storage space on a
full Gigabyte drive, either!
	Thanks to those who answered. It will give me something new to learn
over the Holidays.
	Stu

On Wed, 2009-12-16 at 20:26 -0700, betty wrote:
> This is the last forum for my research on this project, everyone's 
> advice here has always been most helpful. Although i haven't needed too 
> much advice lately (since linux is sooo stable !)
> 
> I have an old pentium 3 with ide  hdd that i have been using for many 
> years. It is a little slow (to say the least) especially running 
> multiple apps.
> I was just given a dell optiplex mini form factor w/pentium 4 and sata 
> drive connectors. (*no hdd*).
> It looks like there are two options here;
> 
>  i can get ide to sata connectors and use my old drive so nothing really 
> changes and it seems easy, however the hdd is old (maybe 10 years) so i 
> risk eventual hardware failure.
> or
> i can get a sata drive and copy everything to it. seems best way to me. 
> not that much more expensive. will last longer  etc.
> 
> question: if i go for option two, is there a way to copy (like mirror) 
> my old drive stuff to the new one so it works and looks the same to 
> me???, if so how do i do that? (the old computer does not have a working 
> cdrw)
> or do i need to do a new install and copy my files over :(
> 
> thanks for your patience and help in advance.
>