SATA advice

[Ka0s^]

i have dual sata connecters on my board (NF7-s) if i choose to run just 1 sata drive will this work or do i need 2 to make a raid? i have no experience with multi HDs :lol: Also will XP pro detect the drive when i reinstall? O r will i need to run the SATA driver first? again i would have no idea how to do this. I plan on buying at least 1 SATA drive next staurday so any input will be greatly appreciated :)

[Torteth]

First up, I'd remove that IP sig if I was you... been some controversy about it...

As for SATA drives, they are pretty much very similar to IDE drives.
If you plan on installing your OS Fresh onto the new drive, you may or may not need a floppy disk with the SATA drivers on it, which you put in when prompted during installation (at the very start). Otherwise its just smooth sailing.
And no you dont have to make a raid, the two channels are seperate entities, you can just run 1 single SATA Drive.
If you plan to ghost/clone your old install onto the SATA drive, you'll probably run into some problems, depending on how the motherboard handles the SATA drives... I had some issues with my Asus A7N8X... mainly because I dont have a floppy drive and was trying to make it install windows without the SATA drivers.... :P

[ElfinLord]

I have a Seagate Barracuda 80 GB SATA HDD.

I run only one on XP Pro.

XP Pro did not detect my HDD when I installed. I had to press F6 to let it know that I needed to install drivers for my HDD.

After I did that and inserted the disk everything else went fine. I would imagine, as long as they are the same, which they should be, that you would only have to do it once.

As far as needing 2 is concerned, you only need 2 if you want to run a RAID. RAID is pretty cool for fault tolerance or performance.

If you run 'striping' the system places alternating pieces of data on each HDD. This adds to performance as it doesn't have to put it all on 1 HDD at a time.

Your other option is to run 'mirroring'. With this RAID setup, each HDD is an exact duplicate, a copy or "mirror" of the other. This gives you the satisfaction to know that if one drive fails the other has the same data on it. Pretty cool if you are worried about losing your data.

I am probably going to buy a pair of WD Raptor 36.7 GB HDDs (http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/WD360GD.asp) in the next few months. When I do I will run my RAID in striping. ;)

Anyway, I hope everything is correct that I have written here. This is how I have always understood RAIDs. If I am wrong, I'm sure someone will be along soon to correct me. :D

I hope I have been able to help.

Good luck!

[msdong]

i have a SATA raid controller on my epox board and can boot from ONE HD connected. the driver for xp give me just additional speed. without it the drive is insanely slow. because of that i have a normal HD to start the system and SATA for Data.


btw you sig is KOS ;) (and im shure im not running IE6)

[Tratos]

tyis has nothing to do with your post:

Remove your sig before its done for you.

~T

[Ka0s^]

ok ty for making me remove my sig :)

Also ty for teh info :)

Im thinkin of getting the seagate barracuda drive also

[ElfinLord]

Originally posted by Ka0s^
Im thinkin of getting the seagate barracuda drive also
It's a great drive. I have not had any problems with it at all. :)

The only reason I am going to get the WD Raptor is for the speed. You don't get much faster than that without going SCSI. :D

[El_MUERkO]

I have 2 80 gig western digital SATA drives, right now I'm not running raid cause I need to put loads of stuff on a storage drive and I'm busy fixing to machines and setting up a home linux server for file sharing and general pricking about but my friend does and and he says its seriously improves the speed of the machine basicly cutting seek time in half.

[darkservent]

just one word of advice when dealin with SATA drives. NEVER EVER add a IDE drive with it unless u now wot ur doin. I had a problem where after makin my SATA drive primary windows drive i added a IDE drive afterwards and wot happend was the system changed the primary drive to the IDE and the SATA was secondry this inturn made windows think that the IDE was primary and somehow moved its boot info to the IDE - god nows how it did that. i only found this out when i ran PQMAGIC and it told me that the SATA Drive is unreadable. Now i have a MSI DELTA ILSR and this is wot happen unless some1 can tell me wot i have to do to stop the PC thinkin IDE is the primary i can never use all my drive to get most storage space out of it. It was a long process in the end to sort it all out i had to clone all my important data to my external drive and do a reformat on the WHOLE SATA drive. One thing for sure is SATA ROX AsS. I Love the seagate drives the most goddamn reliable drives in this world ive used so far.

Can someone tell me wot PATA is abt is its more faster interface and is there drives available for them??????

[ElfinLord]

If you run IDE with SATA and the SATA drive is the boot drive, you need to set your boot order in BIOS to boot to SCSI first.

That's what I had to do on my Asus A7N8X Deluxe board when I was moving data from my IDE to my SATA.

[darkservent]

ok ill have to see.