My friend wanted to add another hard drive to his old alienware PC to use the computer to store music. I said okay, let me look inside real quick. I took a peek, saw two SATA drives, and told him what to buy.

Well, OOPS. Turns out the two SATA drives took up the only two SATA ports on the motherboard. I know I'm an idiot for not checking this but I just didn't think about it.

I see I can buy internal SATA ports that install via PCI. Are these things pretty much plug and play with maybe a driver install on a ~2004 Windows XP machine? Or am I going to run into some limitations?

Another option: http://www.amazon.com/Serial-DVD-ROM-Interface-Convert-Adapter/dp/B002Y2NI4M

That would however make the drive speed take a ****.

Not really, no.

I've got a PCI SATAII card that I plan on using for my old Dell box that doesn't have SATA ports, card has 4 internal 2 external. If I finally get around to doing that this weekend, I'll let you know. Comes with a driver CD, only SysReq is Windows 2000 min.

I think the answer is 'depends on his setup'. PCI can support SATA2 speeds but PCI is a shared bus, so if he has other PCI cards or motherboard components tied to the PCI bus it could prevent him from seeing full SATA2 speeds.

Even then, no. Most typical hard drives barely max out SATA1 under ideal conditions. SSDs would really be the ones affected.

I meant the DVD SATA-IDE adapter.