sata adapter?

H

heyman421

banned
Hey guys.

I have an hp1080n, which uses an asus motherboard with 4 SATA plugs (only one being used) and with sata drives being cheaper and faster than ATA drives, i wanted to upgrade my computer with an additional 500GB seagate.

Problem is, my power supply only has one sata power adapter.

It's a 500w rms power supply, it just has a crap selection of outputs.

Is there a quick fix?

Thanks a million.
 
There are simple converters out there. I know I got one with my USB to IDE/SATA converter. Also, if you'd switch to Western Digital, I beleive many of their drives have both the SATA and Molex power connection.
 
oh ok, i'm not loyal to any one brand

wd or seagate are my two top picks, never heard anything good or bad about maxtors or any other brands

how do i know if i have sata or sata-II?

My cable looks like this:

7-pin-sata-cable.gif


sata and sata II aren't compatable with each other, are they?

if you can't tell from the pic, it's an L-shape configuration.

i tried looking online, but i can't find pics of internal sataII cables, only the external ones for RAID towers, etc.
 
They are interchangeable. If you only have SATA I but get an SATA II drive, you simply need to set a jumper on the drive. Otherwise, it makes no difference.
 
sorry to bug you again, but is the sata bus speed of 1.5 gb/s for the entire set of 4 drives?

i can't help but wonder why they made a faster interface, when most hard drives only have a 300mB/s (give or take) transfer rate?

are there like quad-raid drives out there or something that actually take advantage of the speed?

or should i just be happy sata drives are so cheap, and stop worrying about this :)

j/k, i was just curious
 
OK, I did a little research so I'd get everything correct :P

The 1.5Gb/s and 3.0Gb/s(gigabits) is the actual interface speed. However, they only encode at around 80% efficiency. Thus, 1.2Gb/s converted or 153.6MB/s(2.4Gb/s and 307.2MB/s)

Each plug is independent, so the more disks the faster it'll go. But unless you plan to actually use 4 disks(and even so) there's not a very noticeable performance increase.
 
that makes a lot more sense.

thank you x10

even 153.6MB/s far exceeds my needs

i just want a second drive to put downloaded files/etc. so that i can keep them when doing a recovery on my primary drive.

i've been squeezing by with a single drive, and the fragmentation gets so bad, that i can't even burn discs at higher than 6x without them having to stop and wait for the buffer once or twice

with a second drive, i'll be able to transfer the file to the other drive, eliminating fragmentations without actually having to defragment constantly.
 
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