Changing from IDE to SATA drives - Questions

Hello All,

Pretty much as the title says really. I've currently got 2 IDE drives but need more storage, so though that I might go for a SATA drive, as I've seen many on offer. Just have a few questions before I commit though...

1) My mobo - Asrock Dual Sata2 apparently has 2 SATA ports and one SATAII port. When I see drives I see SATA150 and SATA300. Do these mean SATA/SATAII?

2) Are the SATA300 drives backward compatible - ie. Can I plug one into a standard SATA port (Hypothetically, if i wanted to get lots of drives)

3) I dont have any SATA cables so I will have to get some but I was wondering how the Master/Slave setup works? Can you only have one device per SATA port? Or is it 2 like IDE?

4) Lastly, are there actually any real-life improvements from moving to SATA from IDE? or are they just theoretical?

Thanks for any help that you could give me. I keep seeing several 500GB drives which look really tempting!!!

JP

1. yes
2. yes
3. 1 drive per cable so no master slave config needed.
4. same drive sata/pata will be very similar in performance, not much in it really, sata 2 is a bit faster, and then you have the 10,000rpm drives like the raptor, which are faster still.

Thanks a lot for the answers - If there isnt much difference then maybe i could just go for the PATA drive - as on scan quite a few of the same capacity/brand drives are cheaper in the PATA version.

Not that I'm a cheapo, but at at least all I'll have to do is swap out the existing drive.

JP

You could go for pata, but will the next mobo you buy have enough ide ports for your drives? Many new mobos only come with 1 ide port, which is fine if you only have 2 pata drive (1 hd, 1 dvd) but what if you have 2 hd and 2 dvds, you will end up either dumping some of them, or buying a pata pci card (or external boxes).

At least with sata, it's almost certain that you will be able to continue using the drive for a long time to come (assuming no tech failure with the drive itself).

i think if your buying an internal hd these days, it makes more sence to go sata. As clunk says there's not that much difference performance wise, but there's a lot of benefit in terms of getting rid of the thick ide cable.

Also most modern intel mobos only have a single ide port (allowing 2 drives) which most will use for optical drives.

luck:D

Hmm. Good point, hadnt thought of that really. To be honest I woudnt want to go over 2 HD, atm I have one 125GB and one 250GB. I'm probably going to get a 400/500GB one and keep the 125 as a spare.

But anyway, SATA does seem the way to go but one last thing. Maybe I'm getting confused, but do you need to have drivers on floppy to be able to do a clean install? Or is that just for RAID? I havent had a floppy in the system for a while so i dont want to get to a point where i have reformatted and then cant actually got through with it.

On the link below:Asrock Mobo Page

That is the driver page for my mobo and there are drivers for SATA and SATAII there. Do you think that they can be installed AFTER an initial OS install? I know that XP can be funny to begin with driver wise - but I am sure that Vista probably has better driver support built in.

Any thoughts on the above would be much appreciated. Pretty close to just going off to scan to get a 500GB drive now, so any answers would help out loads!

JP

On 939 chances are it's an nvidia chipset so u should only need the floppy & do [F6] if u use raid. On initial install Microsoft drivers will be used & everythinhg will be fine, you can install the Nvidia sata drivers to complete XP install.

if xp doesn't show your drives then retry using the floppy.

Another tip if installing xp onto a new sata drive:-
Disconnect any IDE drives b4 starting. U can reconnect them when xp is installed.

The reason 4 this is that xp insists on making the 1st drive it sees the boot disk, so writing boot sector to ide drive which always appear in bios b4 sata. by having only sata connected this is avoided.

luck:D