My new motherboard’s main HD is SATA. The DVD drives are IDE. I took my main data HD out of my old machine and hooked it up to the IDE channel (unplugging one of the DVD drives to do so) in order to transfer all my data to the new drive. The transfer was agonisingly slow. I don’t understand why, but I figure it has something to do with SATA to IDE communication. Can that be right? What is that about, exactly?

Also, if there is indeed such a slow transfer of information, doesn’t that mean that burning CD’s/DVD’s cannot take place at high speeds?

This is my first SATA hardware, so I am totally new to it…

That’s extremely weird…I too am very new to this SATA thing, but have not noticed any such problems with data transfer between my SATA to IDE or IDE to IDE drives, even though my system is plagued by all sorts of other problems.

Could it be something driver related? Try this software (hdtach 3) on both drives and see the results:

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

Dunno it could also have something to do with these various IDE modes like Ultra DMA, DMA, etc.

I’d try two things: First, make sure that, as Rahul said, the DVD drive is using UDMA or DMA rather than PIO. Secondly, you might make sure you’re using the latest drivers for your motherboard chipset.