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Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 8,443
Likes: 3
Trumpy Offline OP
Member
Setting up a single SATA drive in a computer?

I bought a new mother-board some months back, it is a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H, with a Dual Core Intel CPU.

Now this MB, has support for 1 IDE HDD, which I have the MBR installed on.
All of the other on-board storage sockets are for SATA drives.
I have a DVD burner/drive and a new Western Digital 500GB HDD I would like to install.

No matter how many times I have read the manual (a PDF these days), it is written in such a way that I'll be blowed if I can understand what on earth they are on about.

From what I can work out, I don't have to create a RAID array, for the one HDD, but is the DVD unit included in what could be called an array?

I've been putting off installing this gear for about 6 weeks, as you only get one chance to do this properly, without affecting the current IDE HDD.

Can someone please HELP!!!!

I've never had to work with SATA before, I wish I didn't have to now either.

BTW, there was a mention of having to make a floppy disk, with some data on it, my computer does not have one of these sorts of drives, neither do most newer computer these days, how do you get around this?

Regards,
Mike. shocked

Joined: Nov 2005
Posts: 827
Likes: 1
J
Member
Mike,
I recently installed a 2nd, ITB Seagate SATA in my dual core XP machine. Seagate's installation CD made it easier than I expected. My goal was to have it as a copy destination for important files and to direct all the large video captures to it. All of my programs still run from the C drive. Are you going to use yours for mass storage or do you wish to mirror your existing drive? I think that you will be pleased with how it turns out. I think you can make a boot CD like you used to make a floppy.
Joe

Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 404
Member
Just plug it in and go... RAID is for setting up multiple hard drives for redundancy. Many SATA boards come with on-board RAID support, whereas you previously had to use third-party software.

You shouldn't need any floppies, most OSes these days come with bootable CDs. Your BIOS is probably set up to boot from CD by default also.

Joined: Jul 2004
Posts: 9,923
Likes: 32
G
Member
Most of these boards with SATA also have the regular IDE controller and you can go into BIOS to decide who will be the boot device if you have both installed. That will be the C:. This could be handy if you wanted 2 operating systems. Right now I have one drive set up as native DOS and the other is W/98. When I finally get around to loading the XP pro disk I have that will be XP and W/98.


Greg Fretwell
Joined: Jul 2002
Posts: 8,443
Likes: 3
Trumpy Offline OP
Member
Thanks a lot for your comments guys.
As far as I'm concerned, this is one of two Windows computers I own, it has XP, it has 4GB of RAM, it is the computer I mainly use for important things.

I want the new SATA disk drive to be a seperate drive to C:
C: is partitioned into C and D drives, E is the CD ROM Drive
F is the USB stick I sometimes use to add stuff from "outside", it also shows up as G drive, after I have plugged it into my laptop, so that letter is not available.

I don't want striping or anything like that, because if one drive fails, it will take the whole array out, they must be independent of one another.

Joined: Jul 2004
Posts: 9,923
Likes: 32
G
Member
Raid is going to make one bad drive transparent. You can rebuild the bad drive from the stripes on the good ones. That is the reason for doing it. We used Raid 5 where you have 4 drives to handle about 3 drives worth of data.
If you are not raiding them, when you add the second drive one will be C:, the other D: then extended partitions will start with E: on the C: drive and whatever address is next on the D drive when you finish all the partitions on C:.
It is a good idea to label each drive with the address they are when things are normal. Then if something is wrong it becomes apparent right away. You can really get confused otherwise.
My CDROM is I: on this machine. (2 drives with multiple partitions and a ram drive). When I plug in a USB card reader it can really get confusing. I get up to drive M:


Greg Fretwell
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 1,213
S
Member
RAID a cheap feature to add, so most modern motherboards have that capability, but don't feel like you need to use it.

SATA is just like IDE, only the cable is easier to route smile Don't do anything different than you'd do with IDE. Once the drive is installed, go into BIOS and enable it. One problem you *may* run into is that the legacy IDE port is sometimes either/or with one of the SATA pairs, in that you have to disable the IDE to use the opposite SATA ports (or vice versa). If this is the case, you can either try another SATA port or get a converter to plug your IDE drive into a SATA port for about $15; I had to do this with my last motherboard.

SATA is faster than IDE, but the drives themselves aren't any faster, so you'd probably never notice the speed difference.

Joined: Mar 2007
Posts: 404
Member
With SATA, you also don't have to worry about jumper settings or slave/master configurations.

Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 1,213
S
Member
Or manually setting the drive cylinder and other information in BIOS before it would recognize the drive. Oh man was that ever a pain in the ass! Not too much of that with modern motherboards, though. All nice and easy now smile

Joined: May 2004
Posts: 364
G
Member
Stripping can be good sometimes.... crazy

Last edited by Gloria; 10/30/08 12:04 PM.

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