Running 2 SATA II drives NO RAID?

[lennydude]

Was wondering if I could get some help?

I currently have a WD 250GB SATAII drive running off my SATA 1 connector with a red cable. Everything works fine.

What I would like to do is get another hard drive for backup purposes only. I had a second 30gb drive that was a regular EIDE drive but it is quite old and I want to update it.

Without running RAID.....................do I just plug the new drive into the next SATA connector and use a black cable? Will this drive automatically be set to slave if it is set up this way or do I still have to set jumpers on the drive?

OR................should I just purchase a external USB hard disk drive?

Thanks for your help and opinions..............

Lenny

 

[slicessoul]

There is no Master or Slave in SATA. 1 connector is for one peripheral.
For RAID or not RAID, you can set this in BIOS.

Red Cable / Black Cable ? As i know, SATA cable is red. Maybe there's another colour and not so important though.

 

[Codesmith]

1) SATA cables come in all the colors of the rainbow, nothing inside your computer is color coded, and the colors used for keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers ... vary from OEM to OEM.

2) No mater/slave with SATA since SATA drives never share a data cable.

3) What you probably want to ask is how do tell the system what drive to boot from?

The answer is that you go into the CMOS Setup (AKA BIOS) and set the hard drive boot order.

The default order is often Primary Master, Secondar Master, Primary Slave, Secondary Slave ....

So some people mistakenly assume that Master/Slave settings determine which drive the system attempts to load the OS from.