I need to reinstall my Windows 7 from cracked to legal. My PC has 3 HD in it. 200 GB SATA, 200 GB Primary IDE and 160 GB Secondary IDE. It is currently loaded on the 200gb Primary IDE and the other 2 are for backup and saving data. Would I be better off installing Windows 7 on the SATA drive and using both IDE drives for backup and saving data? If so is the easiest way to just disconnect the IDE drives until Windows 7 is installed then format the original OS drive to use for backup?
ide or sata Ide is not normally used on system critical machines nowadays (although there are still a lot of them out there), but I would suggest installing the operating system on the sata, it runs faster and is more resilient than ide, using ide for backup and important data is not recommended, I have lost count of how many companies have had to spend thousands ££££££ to recover data from crashed drives. But the final decision is yours , but if you want to go ahead, disconnect the data and backup from the system before you install the system drive, this will ensure you don't overwrite anything you deem important.
If all three of your drives have proven to be reliable, reinstall your system on your newest drive. It's always a crap shoot, but the newest drive may have a slight edge in longevity owing to the fact that it has clocked less run time. There's nothing inherent in the design of an SATA drive that makes it more robust, and it may or may not be significantly faster (in practical application) than your others drives. There are more things than just published hard drive data rate that determine overall system performance. I too have replaced many IDE drives that have failed but that's not an indicator of how reliable they are in general. In general ALL IDE drives in use are aging because newer technology is pushing them into obsolescence. But as SATA becomes more prevalent, proportionally more of them will fail too. The "problem" is not the unsuitable nature of the IDE drives, it's the age of their population.