Back from the grave for some hardware help

On my current dimension 8400, i have SATA cables for hard drives. I have an old ATA/IDE hard drive that I want to hook up. I bought a converter to go from ata to sata but i ran into a problem. when i plug the converter in, i have three ports available. One is the new SATA ribbon plug in, which I hooked up, but the other two are the new SATA power source and the old ATA power source (the converter doesn't cover this or plug into it). Do i need to plug in the converter's power AND the ATA HDD's power or just one, and if just one, which one? Thanks for the help.

So, basically two or one? and which one?

)corjello(

Welcome back!

You can either use the SATA power connection or the molex power connection, but don't use both at the same time.

Hello corjello,

Just use one of the 2 plugs, no need to plug in too, some people even reported a fried port which sounds crazy to me but some people could get it done . An original SATA power plug has also a 3.3 volt (orange) line but it’s only needed for e.g. hot swap functionality.

well, thanks for the advice. Right when I posted this thread, i found this website which is the exact converter i have. According to their directions, I need to hook up both power sources because the converter needs power to work. All i have running on the old HDD is a Ubuntu distro, so no important files are located there at the moment. I guess I'll just monitor my heat levels and make sure everything stays normal. If you feel like they are misleading me, then by all means please explain.

)corjello(

Well, you've probably done it correctly if it works.

If you've done it wrong, it probably would not work or something.

But most motherboards which have SATA also have have an old IDE/ATA port for backwards-compatibility.

Intel dropped support for old IDE/(P)ATA in the P35 chipset, but most motherboard manufacturers add support to it via a Marvell chip or something.