Old hobby builder has question about new fangled sata

[Guest]

Hello,
I was used to building pcs for myself with IDE. Now I see everything is SATA. I take it a setup consisting of a HDD for the OS, a HDD for my data, and two optical drives, will all live comfortably on a mobo just like all my IDEs used to?
Having 2 sata hard drives would the system try to use them as an array? or can they be used independantly as i intend??
Cheers All
Steve

 

[gussrtk]

a little bit confusing to me as the way you put the question.. but i will attempt it since no one else did

pretty much plug and play.. sometimes you have problems but not often. (as with which slot you plug it to)

maybe just keep 1HDD hooked in when installing windows to make sure you get it on the desired one, that's what i did >.>

everything displays in windows like it used to

 

[Outlander_04]

Most motherboards have 6 or more SATA ports

Set up is as simple as plugging the device in . And marvelling at how the inside of the case doesnt look like a tangled mess of wires

RAID arrays are set up in BIOS first .
As is AHCI mode to add all the performance features . [ many boards default to "IDE mode" which works with windows XP without using a floppy to add a SATA driver]

Operating systems after XP just install

 

[fixer762]

From my understanding old IDE stuff shares channels limiting the number of devices and you have to play with the bios more and master/slave mode. Each Sata devices operate on its own channel offering far more bandwidth.
Maybe Linus can explain it better? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZr8Pr3_vE