Installing SATA Hard Drives

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Guest

I finally finished building my computer, but the IDE hard drive i had in it
was only 8 gigs. I instantly filled this to the brim with various
applications of all sorts (everything from Adobe Photoshop to STEAM). So i
bought myself annother drive, this time a 250 GB SATA. I physically installed
it (IE actually put it in the box and pluged it in). I have RAID drivers for
it, and installed those with out too much hastle, but my computer dosent
detect the extra drive at all, much less acesses it. All i really want to do
is add annother drive i can save stuff to, like an E:\ drive or something.
 
Because you said RAID, you are in a different world. The computer sees the
RAID array and not the hard drive! That is the whole purpose of a RAID
controller. If you are connecting only one drive to a RAID controller, it
is like buying a mother for 4 CPU's and only installing one CPU! What is
the point of buying a motherboard for 4 CPU's when you only use one?

To answer you question directly; when your computer POSTs, your RAID
controller will POST also. During POST, enter the BIOS of the RAID
controller and configure a drive. Then, your computer will see the drive
you have just created.
 
Scratch that first part, about windows not detecting the drive. I did some
messing around and it turned out to be a faulty power plug. I still cant
acess the drive thogh, and the device manager says its working properly.
 
that was my question too!
Click to expand...

I recently retired my noisy IDE drive for a pair of fast & quiet SATA discs
of the same size & connected them to the on-board RAID controller of my
A7N8X-E. Disc 0 has one active boot partition & logical volumes whilst disc
1 has logical volumes only. You don't have to use RAID. I wouldn't buy a PCI
RAID card to do this /unless/ my motherboard didn't have SATA & I really,
really wanted them. I assume the OP has built-in RAID.

Having 2 identical discs allows me to experiment later with RAID 0 when I've
either purchased an IDE drive for backups or a Firewire/USB2 external one.
I'm not sure if you actually need to install the RAID drivers for this
config but I did (SI3112). Boot time off SATA 0 is about 2 secs longer than
if the RAID controller was disabled in the Bios - a small penalty.

Regards, Paul
 
I did not understand what you were trying to say...

It seems like you are justifying NOT configuring a RAID drive!

That is like justifying buing a server motherboard with 4 CPU sockets and
installing only one CPU and then using it for a workstation...you can do
that...but why?
 
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