New computer, older hardware?

Hi everyone, I need some advice! I have a new computer with a ECS Elitegroup nForce 570 Slit-A motherboard, with Pentium D 3GB Dual Core processor, a Hitachi Deskstar 320 GB HD and a Lightscribe DVD Rewriter with 2GB OCZ DDR2 memory and would like to know if I can add my older Seagate Barracuda 7200 160 Gb HD ( to access data from it ), also my older Lite-On DVD-rom drive, and lastly my old 6 in 1 Card Reader? Can my new machine cope with these and if so how do I go about it? I would class myself as neither a newbie or for that matter an expert! Any advice would be most appreciated, thanks.

 

I googled your mobo, hopefully these pictures are your board: http://www.ocworkbench.com/2006/ecs/NFORCE 570 SLIT-A/g2.htm

Please ignore this post if I got the wrong board.

You can have 2 IDE devices and 4 SATA devices. Not sure what kind of hard drives you have are they SATA or IDE?

Your 6 in one card reader should plug into one of the yellow USB headers right above the IDE connection.

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Hi, Thanks for that. Yes, this is my mobo, I have googled my new HD drive, the Hitachi, and its a SATA drive. The HD from my older machine, the Seagate, appears to be an IDE drive. Can I add this older Seagate drive to the machine and hopefully access its contents? Can I add the older Lite-On DVD drive also? Thanks again for any advice!

 

Yes you can add the drive as a slave drive. But you are limited to only 2 IDE devices, (hard drive + DVD, or 2 optical drives, or 2 hard drives.) You could get a PCI card to run more IDE drives I think, or use a SATA to IDE adapter to the spare drive.

Another option would be to buy an external hard drive enclosure and hook your spare drive up via USB. Handy way to transfer large files to another computer if you need to.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817388005

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