Sata & IDE?

C

CrazyEh

New Member
Well the time has come. I finally filled my 80GB hd that I've had for the past 4 years. I need to replace it with a larger one. I have been looking at a 320gb from tg.ca. I noticed there doesn't seem to be a molex connector? Is that normal for SATA? HD Shown Here.

Anyway, here's my question. I've been using IDE all along, I have never touched a SATA drive, ever. I've been thinking about purchasing a SATA drive, but am wondering if it's hard to setup? Is it anything like IDE? I find IDE very straight forward. Once I install the SATA drive, will I have any extra drivers to install before my pc will read it? What about RAID? Will I need to set whatever that is, up?

My motherboard does support SATA, it has 4 spots. Last question I think! Will I be able to use my SATA HD & IDE HD at the same time?

Thanks alot!
 
Last edited:
S-ATA drives don't use a molex connector, they have a 'special' connector just for sata drives.

sata-connector-174x200.gif


My brothers sata drive just went straight in his computer, i formatted it and loaded windows with no problems. Some people have told me that you need s-ata drivers, but i've never used them so i don't know what difference this makes.

You only need to setup raid if you want faster writing speeds, because this makes the computer write to both drives at the same time to save time and increase writing speeds. I found this good article from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID0#RAID_0

Yes, you can use IDE and S-ATA drives in combination with each other.;)
 
CrazyEh said:
Well the time has come. I finally filled my 80GB hd that I've had for the past 4 years. I need to replace it with a larger one. I have been looking at a 320gb from tg.ca. I noticed there doesn't seem to be a molex connector? Is that normal for SATA? HD Shown Here.
Click to expand...

SATA drives uses its own power connectors. Just about all powersupplies today has these connectors. If not, you can always buy an adpater.

CrazyEh said:
Anyway, here's my question. I've been using IDE all along, I have never touched a SATA drive, ever. I've been thinking about purchasing a SATA drive, but am wondering if it's hard to setup? Is it anything like IDE? I find IDE very straight forward. Once I install the SATA drive, will I have any extra drivers to install before my pc will read it? What about RAID? Will I need to set whatever that is, up?
Click to expand...

SATA is more straightfoward than IDE. There's no more jumpers and masters and slaves to worry about. As for RAID, they're used for either increased performance or increased reliability. Look at the RAID 101 for more details as I don't know that much about them.


CrazyEh said:
My motherboard does support SATA, it has 4 spots. Last question I think! Will I be able to use my SATA HD & IDE HD at the same time?
Click to expand...

Yup
 
What make and model board are you running? For Asus there's a hardware configuration section in the bios to set one hard drive(sata or ide) as the default boot device. On many systems to install XP onto a sata requires a floppy driver disk where you press the F6 option when reaching the first splash screen on the XP installer. Vista will now readily see sata drives without the need to load drivers from floppy.

If needed you would use the option found on the board's software disk to create the driver floppy rather then downloading since that seems to see the best results for making up the floppu itself. The onboard sata controllers will have to be enabled if not already. Refer to the board's user manual on that. Unfortunately Tiger CA seems to be limited on sata drives there. For $10 more US I picked up two WD 500gb sata models for the $109- price there.
 
I'm using an ASUS P5L-D... any other suggestions for places to purchase HD's? Must be able to shit to Canadan though. Also, I noticed some of the drives are 7200.10.. whats the .10 for? Better?

Thanks again.
 
I was looking at the drives listed and prices seen at http://www.memoryexpress.com/index.php?PageTag=&page=cat&memx_menu=106&SID= and walked away.

For drives they were higher on price then seen on the same models at TigerDirect CA. But on other hardwares you can often find some deals. Unfortunately the WD 500gb sata model 7200rpm with a 16mb cache costs twice as much Canadien then seen at newegg. The board for the new build here will have 6 sata ports for a possible array sometime as well as running sata optical drives.
 
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