IDE hard drive

I was just wondering if it's possible to connect my old 80gb IDE hard disk to my mac pro. All the hard drive bays are SATA now but I'm guessing the optical drives are still IDE (You cant really see when you open it up). Would this work? I just want to copy a whole load of stuff over, and I could just burn some DVD's but I cant really be bothered! And if this did work I'd be tempted to just leave it in there - the performance difference between SATA and IDE is unnoticeable in my experience.

You can buy adapters that let you plug parallel IDE drives into SATA controllers, but I'm not sure if they would fit into the Mac Pro's drive caddies - they do add bulk to the drive. Failing that, you can pick up USB or Firewire enclosures pretty cheaply, and a firewire one would give you good performance as well as plugability.

Yes is the simple answer to this question, i just did exactly that!

I went from my trusty G4 Cube to a blazing fast new MacPro at the weekend. I had a 200GB IDE drive in the cube but had to use HiCAP ATA program to enable support for the extra large HDD in the cube as it would not recognise more than 120GB normally. This meant I was unable to use firewire-to-firewire transfer wizard in OS X as I couldn't boot the cube into target disk mode.

I popped the IDE drive out the cube, opened up the MacPro and removed the caddy for the optical drives. I have two superdrives so simpy disconnected one, connected up the IDE drive and power and powered back up. Drive appeared as it should on the desktop, simply drag and drop from there.