My computers internal hard drive is ide. I heard that with an IDE to SATA converter card, you could make your ide drive perform at SATA drive speed and all you have to do is plug in the converter card in the back of the ide drive, and connect the sata cord on the other end into the SATA port on your motherboard. I did just that. I connected the ide end into the harddrive, and made the SATA connection into SATA 1 since no other SATA connections were being used. Then I plugged in the plug. When I powered up my computer, the SATA card light lit bright orange. My computer couldn't read the hard drive, thus I had to disconnect the SATA card, reconnect the ide cable and my computer booted up like normal when I powered it up again. How could I get my computer to operate with the hard drive moving at SATA speed with the IDE to SATA adapter plugged in - or are IDE to SATA adapters a bunch of hype?

Scleros

Yes and no. First generation SATA has max speed of 150 MB/s. Max speed of PATA/133 is 133 MB/s. Theoretical difference of 17 MB/s. In practice, using a desktop drive, its sustained read and write performance will be significantly less than either interface maximum, so you're unlikely to see any real performance difference, as the drive itself is the limitation. The only time when SATA would have an advantage would be situations where the data is already in the drive's cache and the drive can burst up the interface maximum. Desktop usage profile tends to be too random for cache hits to makeup the majority of data requests.

Adapters allow PATA drives to be connected to SATA controllers. They are not for performance gain. Provided you have a quality adapter and everything was powered properly, it should have worked. You might double-check your BIOS options for how your SATA and PATA controllers are enabled, emulated, which is bootable, etc.

KeepItSimpleStupid

Nice job.

Speed is determined by the smallest pipe. e.g. the device with the slowest speed