SATA Saga

  • Thread starter Thread starter John
  • Start date Start date
J

John

SATA seems to be the way to go. I just got a Maxtor 300G SATA 150 drive
playing well with the other drives(IDE) so someone said to make SATA my
System drive. Sounds like a great idea so I went to BestBuy and got a
Western Digital Raptor and it is now my drive C: with the help of the SW
from WD site. Now I have some BIOS menu options that are a bit confusing.
The WD software was what made the System boot to the new drive on the SATA
connector and not a setting in BIOS, correct? It appears my MOBO only has
two SATA connectors and in BIOS I see the two SATA drives showing as port 1
and port 3. Is there any way to add two more SATA with a Y connector or any
other way? Are there MoBos with 4 SATA connectors and I just got unlucky?
Is there a refereed order of drives with a priority to the boot drive as
seen in Disk Manager? My System drive was disk 0 and now is disk 2 does this
matter.

Thanks for any comments. I wish there was a SATA site or FAQ page.

John
 
2 SATA connectors are standard for youre avg board,most higher end have
4, 2 connectors per controller,server boards have more but for RAID.If youre
board supports RAID with SATA drives youre doing better,if not then SATA hds
operate much like IDE would.Youre BIOS has everything to do with boot
priority,
never the software,actually all the hd mfg software can be pitched except
for the
DOS utility.You bought a maxtor SATA,then a wdc SATA,why not purchase 2 of
the same,eventually you'll want/need RAID....
 
Andrew said:
2 SATA connectors are standard for youre avg board,most higher end
have 4, 2 connectors per controller,server boards have more but for
RAID.If youre board supports RAID with SATA drives youre doing
better,if not then SATA hds operate much like IDE would.Youre BIOS
has everything to do with boot priority,
never the software,actually all the hd mfg software can be pitched
except for the
DOS utility.You bought a maxtor SATA,then a wdc SATA,why not purchase
2 of the same,eventually you'll want/need RAID....
Click to expand...

Well, I started out with one SATA. The Maxtor. After I got that running and
liked it I then looked for a Raptor 10,000RPM for System drive. The WD was
all I could find at BestBuy. I have several systems and can swap them out
when I get more SATA drives. For now I want to get accustomed to setting
them up as they are not like the old IDE drives. I mainly need to get the
SATA drives running well with PCI Promise cards installed on all systems as
well. For some reason this is a hit or miss configuration. After finally
getting things settled down and all interfaces responding when I added the
Raptor today the IDE card is no longer seen in windows. BIOS recognizes all
drives but not so in windows for some unknown reason. My board does support
RAID and SATA but at the present the SATA will only work if RAID is
disabled. I am in no hurry to get RAID as I see no large advantage over
what I have now.

John
 
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