SATA pairing confusion by SHIKHAR

  • Thread starter Thread starter katekukku
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katekukku

Hi,
I am planning to buy an AMD 64 bit system, with MSI K8N Neo4 SLI as
base.

Now somebody told me that SATA hdds work only in pairs.
Is that true? Will I have to buy 2 SATA hdds or a single one will do?

Thank
 
Hi,
I am planning to buy an AMD 64 bit system, with MSI K8N Neo4 SLI as
base.

Now somebody told me that SATA hdds work only in pairs.
Is that true? Will I have to buy 2 SATA hdds or a single one will do?

Thank
Click to expand...

That somebody's an idiot.
 
I don't have a lot to add to other posts, but...

SATA drives usually can be used singly. (I believe that the answer is
"always", but I don't know about every mainboard.)

"Somebody" was probably thinking of RAID. It is usually available with
controllers for SATA drives, and a pair of drives is required for the two
commonest forms of RAID (RAID 0, striping for performance, or RAID 1,
mirroring for data security). There is no requirement to use SATA drives in
RAID, though.

I'm not familiar with nForce4 boards, but you'll probably have to install
the RAID drivers for the onboard SATA controller (using F6), even if you
will not be using RAID. (This assumes that you're installing Windows XP.)

If you have time, study the manual, which may be available for download
(www.msi.com.tw). (I don't see one for the K8N Neo 4 SLI, but there is one
for the Neo 4 Platinum SLI.)

HTH.

Address scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
That was certainly true on an Asus P4P800 board that I had (Intel 865PE
chipset), but can you install a non-RAID SATA drive on an nForce4 board
without additional drivers during the installation of XP?

(That's not a rhetorical question.)
 
Bob said:
That was certainly true on an Asus P4P800 board that I had (Intel 865PE
chipset), but can you install a non-RAID SATA drive on an nForce4 board
without additional drivers during the installation of XP?

(That's not a rhetorical question.)
Click to expand...

Bob,

My motherboard is a MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum/SLI. I started with a Maxtor
120GB SATA drive only. Windows XP Pro worked fine with it, and I did
not have to feed it any diskettes during the blue screen part of the
install. Later, I did install the nForce4 drivers, since this is
reported to improve performance, but it was not necessary to do so
SFAIK.

I have subsequently added a second Maxtor SATA 120GB drive, and am
using both as a RAID 1 'drive'. That *did* require me to feed the
nVidia RAID diskettes during the blue screen boot up, and I did have to
reformat my original drive (although, I don't know for certain if this
was absolutely necessary). SFAIK, it's working great so far (knock on
wood -smile-).

Best regards,

George
 
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