Adding a SATA drive

[tkofford]

I have been running out of space on my IDE hard drives, but my motherboard has 2 SATA connectors. It also has a VIA RAID controller.

I was wanting to add another hard drive to my system, but do not have any more IDE connections available, so I though I would simply add a SATA drive to my system since my motherboard supports SATA and has two empty SATA connectors.

Can I just add 1 SATA hard drive, or do I have to use the VIA RAID controller that is also built into my motherboard. If I do have to use the VIA RAID controller, can I still only use 1 SATA drive?

motherboard: Epox EP-8KRAIPRO

Thanks in advance,
TK

 

[sturm]

You may have to enable the raid controller. Not all motherboards are the same.
Plug the sata drive in to sata1 connection. Go into the bios and see if the drive is detected. If so then continue to boot to windows.
Once in windows a "new hardware box" may pop up for the new drive. If it doesnt then 'right click' my computer and select manage. Goto disk management and have it rescan for new drives - Action -> rescan drives.
If it doesnt then you will need to enable the raid controller in the bios. Follow the motherboard manual on how to do that. Also have the motherboard cd with you as it may need to load drivers once windows loads up.

Let us know how it goes.

 

[michaelahess]

Just throw in a drive, make sure boot priority in the bios is for the ide not sata.

 

[tkofford]

Well, this exercise was not as easy as I had hoped. My mobo only supports SATA I, but my new drive (WD2000JS) was SATA II and the BIOS didn't recognize it when I installed it. After a lot of trial and error in the BIOS, I finally got it to work.

Here is what I finally did, which makes sense to me now.
1) Set the jumper on my new drive to limit it to SATA I
2) Change the settings in my BIOS under "Integrated peripherals" from "RAID" to "IDE". This gave me (according to the BIOS) 4 IDE drives (2 "real" IDE channels + 2 SATA channels).

"Real" IDE Drives
--------------------
drive 0 - master (IDE drive)
drive 0 - slave (zip drive)
drive 1 - master (DVD burner)
drive 1 - slave (CD burner)

SATA Drives
-------------------
drive 2 - SATA 1 (SATA drive)
drive 3 - SATA 2 (empty)

Now everything is good and I only had to install 1 SATA drive. Another benefit is that the BIOS doesn't bother to go through the "RAID" settings each time now and the new SATA drive is "detected" as IDE drive 2.

I know that I probably should get a SATA II card to use instead so that I can take advantage of the new drive's speed, but I just needed to add more space.

 

[sturm]

You wont really get any more speed out of the sata II drive running in sata II mode.
Sata 1 drives cant max out there bandwidth yet

 

[pat]

Well, this exercise was not as easy as I had hoped. My mobo only supports SATA I, but my new drive (WD2000JS) was SATA II and the BIOS didn't recognize it when I installed it. After a lot of trial and error in the BIOS, I finally got it to work.

Here is what I finally did, which makes sense to me now.
1) Set the jumper on my new drive to limit it to SATA I
2) Change the settings in my BIOS under "Integrated peripherals" from "RAID" to "IDE". This gave me (according to the BIOS) 4 IDE drives (2 "real" IDE channels + 2 SATA channels).

"Real" IDE Drives
--------------------
drive 0 - master (IDE drive)
drive 0 - slave (zip drive)
drive 1 - master (DVD burner)
drive 1 - slave (CD burner)

SATA Drives
-------------------
drive 2 - SATA 1 (SATA drive)
drive 3 - SATA 2 (empty)

Now everything is good and I only had to install 1 SATA drive. Another benefit is that the BIOS doesn't bother to go through the "RAID" settings each time now and the new SATA drive is "detected" as IDE drive 2.

I know that I probably should get a SATA II card to use instead so that I can take advantage of the new drive's speed, but I just needed to add more space.

That's the way to do it..

RAID is meant to be use with2 or more HDD (thou some controller need a one drive array to work with single drive), and that SATA is only the new interface standard between an IDE drive a an IDE conroller.

So, you did not tweak the BIOS, but you setted it correctly accordng to you type of setup.

And don't bother about the SATAII thing.. you wont notice any differences...