Hard Disk Drive Setup

[=assassin=]

Hi, I've just ordered a 640GB WD drive from Scan (SATA) and I currently have a 160GB IDE Maxtor installed (along with an IDE DVD-RW drive).

My first question is, will the SATA drive need to be set as slave, or is it set as Master because of SATA being seperate to IDE? I've not dealt with SATA drivers before.

Also, with SP2, will it likely be picked up Ok without having to install any Sata drivers (not that I can find any on the disk for my Gigabyte AM2 motherboard anyway)?

Finally, I plan just to format using the default windows disk management app - are there any particular settings (i.e. a particular cluster size) that I should go for, or just keep it all default?

Thanks for any help provided!

[Webby]

The are no jumpers to set as its one SATA device per channel.

You should be okay without any driver updates I think, but not 100% sure been a while since I added a SATA drive to an existing installation.

Finally just go with the default settings should be fine.

[spoon_]

SATA drive will be fine as long as you won't attempt to install OS on it, XP in many cases doesn't have drivers...

Rest like Webby said no need for any jumpers as its working separately from IDE channels.

[iranu]

Sata doesn't need jumpers, just plug it in and go. One thing you will still need to do though is "initialize" it. After it's installed right click "My Computer" > Manage > Disk management. You'll see your disk and it should with SP2 (normally a wizard) notify you that you need to initialize that disk. If it doesn't you'll need to right click the grey box that has the hard drive icon in it (not the bit to the right of that and it will give you the option to initialize. Once that's done it will allow you to format/partition/access the disk. Just use default settings.

[=assassin=]

Thanks for all the help everyone, it is much appreciated!