Pilot 27 or anyone else who knows about SATA drives... To make a long story short: Have a Harddisk going on the blink so I thought I would replace it. At the PC swap meet today I came upon a Western Digital 250 Gig SATA For $130.00. Was planning on buying a typical ATA 133 but had heard about thses so I figured it was a pretty good deal without really thinking much about it or knowing much about SATA drives.So I quickly read my ASUS MB manual which does support SATA (has the connections), but then I started reading something about have them in pairs?, striping? bla-bla. A bit disoriented at the moment...It's real late here. I'm blurry eyed. So when I wake up tomorrow I will research but in short do I have to buy another one or can I install just one SATA? thx.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......

not shure. im not the brightest when it comes to hard drives. All i know is that i would be running raid config if i knew anything about it. From what i know, IDE is old and is slow, then you have SATA, then your raid hard drives. I know ATA comes in somewhere, but i dont know where.Wish i could help ya out some more bro.. :-wave Im shure some one will read this and shed some knowledge..

You'll have no problem running a single SATA drive.Greg

Well IDE is not really that slow. 133 is more than enough for todays harddrive however many of the newer harddrives tend to be SATA only. Otherwise it

when i built my present system, i origianlly had a CD drive and a DVD writer plus 3 IDE hard drives, i used IDE 1 for 2 of the HDs, IDE 2 for the optical drives and had the other HD on on of the SATA conections via a converter. the system ran, but very badly, often locking up while booting. all drives where recognised and usable, but the system was very sick, susspecting a poor PSU i replaced this but still the PC kept just freezing up. i was at a lose as to why it would not run, evtually after giving in and seeking help i was informed that SATA would only work with paired drives and they needed to be using raid. I removed my CD drive and put the 3 HD on IDE2 and since then have had no problem. my drives where getting full and i thought i may have to gewt a new pair of drives but managed to compress a lot of files to get me more room. i may eventually have to look into SATA drives again but for now i'll stick with the slower IDE drives, at least they are simple to use :)no boubt i will have to use them some time. when i do i will have to do some serious checking, i certaily do not want to go through the trouble and expense i did before. other questions arise, can the SATA drive(s) be used as aditional drives or do they have to be the primary, does the OS need to be on them?

Well I find SATA drives much easier to use. They are designed to be hot swappable so you can put them in and out while running.Also again you definiatly don

There ya go ponyboy,that came from the man.. Greg is alwsays good in these matters. :)

Thanks guys. Aftyer spening the day I was able to get the one SATA installed and running... learning as I went since this being my first SATA install. Two first observations:1. For some reason my searching for files using powerdesk (like Windows Explorer) is just screaming fast? Instant responce.2. On the other side I fired up FS and I am seeing a 50% drop in FPS!? Like seeing 10FPS where I am used to seeing 20.Don't know how these could be relateed to the new install since the disk is formated but empty. Haven't used it for anything yet. Strange.So tonight I will make a copy of my FS drive and drop it onto the SATA tomorrow to see what results I get. And of course I haven't a single glich all day with my quirky HD going on the blink... go figure... ;)

Probably need to relate my own experience with moving a system over to a new computer and using a SATA drive. It turned out to be quite a nightmare, one that still has some lingering effects. I had a moderate home computer running on an AMD 2600 processor under Win XP home. My system drive was a slow 5400 rpm 30G drive and I kept most of my programs and data on a separate 7200 rpm 60gb drive. Both were standard IDE hard drives. Had the chance to upgrade the home computer in order to get parts for creating computers for the kids for Christmas so I went all out. Bought a Lanparty NF3 250 motherboard with an Athlon 64 3200 processor, new memory, new graphics card, and a Maxtor SATA 160gb harddrive. (I ran out of money to get 2 SATAs or I would've done them in RAID 0) My idea was to partition this new drive into 2 parts, the first partition for my system (C:) drive and the remaining space for a data drive. I would leave my programs on the 60gb IDE I had been using for programs and data.My original system drive was formatted in FAT32 instead of NFTS and without wiping everything clean and starting over with the install of a few years of programs, I found the only way to transfer over the operating system to the new SATA partition was to leave it in FAT32. From the beginning, I had trouble getting the motherboard to understand that I wanted to create the partitions on the new SATA drive. Even the utility that Maxtor supplied kept identifying the space on the SATA drive as 60 gb, the size of my program drive. That little voice in my head kept telling me that if I went ahead and created partitions, that somehow these utilities would wipe out my old program drive but I was running on empty, too lazy to sit through an excruciatingly long backup to CD and trusted the Maxtor utility to work properly.Big mistake. Seems the utility did a great job of copying over my system drive to the new partition on the SATA drive and created my secondary data partition but it also copied my system drive over my 60 gb IDE program drive. This huge amount of my program code, digital pictures, video files, etc. were irretrievably lost even to low level data recovery software. Luckily I had backed up some of the data a month or so before but lost all the images I'd shot with my digital camera over the Christmas holidays. To this day, my computer still gets confused about the SATA drive and often will have to have the BIOS reset to get it to understand that the SATA is the primary boot drive and not the 60gb IDE. I am also unable to add another IDE device to the machine. At present, there are only two, the 60gb HD and my DVD burner. Adding another CD player/writer makes the SATA disappear. No combination of drive priority jumpers on the back of the IDE devices seems to matter. There just seems to be this basic problem of compatibility of the IDE and SATA hardware with this motherboard. Have looked for BIOS upgrades and advice from the DFI support center but nobody seems to be having this problem. Now, the good news. When the system is running that SATA drive absolutely blows you away with its speed. My guess is that I'll eventually replace that 60gb IDE drive with another SATA and go to RAID on my system drive. Then, the only thing on my IDE bus will be CD and DVD drives. Art Martin

ouch... losing all theat data and hard work. I've gotten burned too many times in the past 20 years of PC'ing so I am getting pretty adament about complete backups before I do any major changes.Not planning on using the SATA for my boot drive so I don't think I will have that issue plus my ASUS board was designed to incorporate this new type of drive,I finally remembered the only major change I did just before the install was I upgraded to Windows XP SP2. So maybe there are some incompatibilities happening (drivers?) happening that aren't related to the SATA. Eeeck... another issue!

On hindsight I should've stuck with non-SATA for the bootup but it sure seemed to make sense that a super-speed drive for the system made sense since it was so often accessed during the running of your computer and would help ensure rapid startups. One certainly shouldn't be limited in that area. I have this feeling, had I simply backed up everything, wiped all the drives and started over with the new system instead of trying to save myself the headaches of program installs and upgrades again, all those drives would work well with one another and I'd probably not be having the problems I am. Of course I have no patience and I've probably masked the underlying problem by overclocking the new board so it may simply be something I have to live with until I can purchase some new drives and move up again.As long as I can get into flight simulator and buzz around the skies from time to time, I guess life isn't so bad.Art Martin