[SOLVED] Laptop drive ok for desktop?

I'm working on my wife's old P4 and kind of sorting out the mess that is its hard drive configuration. The whole PC is an extremely custom collection of leftovers from other machines... So, the hard drives it has are an equally random selection. It has a dvd burner, a couple of relatively small (under 80GB) hard drives, and a third hard drive that's somewhere around 200 GB, for storage. These are all old PATA drives, not the most predictable at this point. One of them occasionally makes a clicking sound when I boot the machine...

The motherboard has SATA connections, and I have a 160 GB SATA drive that I pulled from my laptop after it died. The drive functions perfectly, but like I said it's a laptop drive, a little 2.5" fellow.

I am considering replacing the current system drive with this SATA drive, but I have two questions:
1. Will PATA and SATA drives play nice if used in the same machine?
2. Are there overheating problems associated with using a laptop hard drive in a desktop computer that is powered on pretty much 24/7?

Thanks for your input.

I've used both drives together on a laptop with no issues. There is one thing to keep in mind, XP & below has problems installing on a drive over 137GB (SATA drives). As to why, I can't answer with certainty, because I've read and heard numerous things in that regard. I would certainly like to find an straight answer to that issue.

A desktop cools much better than a laptop would, so unless there's a problem with the drive, it should run fine. As far as 24/7 goes, this old laptop has run that way for nearly two months now, and still running fine. With all of the extra cooling that the drive would be getting in the desktop, and you being able to keep the dust out better, it should last longer than it would in the laptop. You may want to monitor it for a few days, just to make sure.

If anything laptop drives run cooler than desktop drives so there will not be any problems having that drive in a desktop, even 24/7.

As for the compatibility issue, the harddrive's controller does all the translating so he really makes the reads and writes happen in the proper format for the drive and it shouldn't matter to any standard software whether it is an ATA(PATA), SATA, SATA II, or IDE. The exception may be machine code which wants direct control of the disk, such as recovery programs and some forms of viruses and possibly to the bootmanager (I'm not sure about that last one, but if it is then I'm sure it's coded to handle it).

There should not be any problems. Select which drive you want to install to from within the system bios. It doesn't matter if you have both IDE and SATA drives installed in the system.