SATA Drive questions

[Nick]

Right then, need to get a new drive and seeing as my mobo supports SATA I thought I might as well have one of them, spesh as they're only a tenner more than the ATA version. (We're talking about a Western Digital 120gb drive, btw)

My question is.....

Can I install the SATA drive as my boot drive and still run a second drive on IDE?

If so, I was thinking that I'd do a fresh install of XP etc onto the SATA drive, then hook up my old 60gb IDE drive, transfer across all the data and run that as my second drive for MP3 storage etc etc.

Is this possible? I ask cos there's some stuff on the drive I REALLY don't want to lose, so I'll be backing up anyways, but just transferring info between drives is going to a hell of a lot quicker than swapping in and out loads of cd backups.

[Howard]

I don't see why it shouldn't be possible

Point the XP setup to the floppy disc with the SATA drivers on and install the OS onto it. XP will then pick up the IDE drive and use it as a slave

[Blub2k]

Or get two smaller Sata drives and set them in a raid0 array and have your OS on the IDE drive and your raid array for storage and program installations for speed.

[Nick]

Thing is, I have two optical drives running on the second IDE channel.

Is it possible to run two drives on IDE1, two drives on IDE2 and SATA drives as well?

[Howard]

Yes

[Blub2k]

Yeah they are seperate buses.

[luap.h]

it might be a good idea to disconnect your IDE HD when you install WinXP, as when I tried to install on my SATA (with 2 IDE HDs and 2 opticals) it kept defaulting to the IDE drive and ignoring the SATA

Remember to get the drivers for your SATA controller on floppy and press F6 to install 3rd party drivers. Although you may not install a RAID stripe, you will more than likely still need the RAID drivers. You may get lucky, and not need any drivers on floppy at all. My Asus A7N8X-D needed them, but my brothers P4 board didn't

[Lexeus]

You have a Primary IDE controller, Secondary IDE controller, and a 2 channel SATA controller.


So You can basicly run up to 6 drives.

its very easy

[Blub2k]

Why would he want to install the OS on a raid stripe and not on the IDE? surely he is going to lose speed overall if he has OS on Raid? Better in my opinion to keep the OS on IDE and Raid for storage, installation and swap file.

[Nick]

Cheers for all these rapid replies guys!

I've gone and got me a Western Digital 120gb SATA drive with another one arriving tomorrow to set up RAID.

To keep things easy, I think I'll go with Blubs idea and set up the drives for storage etc etc. I know what I'm doing with IDE and XP installs, done enough of those on this PC!

I have another question, which might seem bleedin obvious to those of you that know about this, but please bear with me...

As I understand it, there are several different ways to set up a RAID array. I've just gone and blown £150 on 2 drives, so I want to get the maximum use out of them, space wise. I seem to remember reading somewhere that a RAID array treats both drives as one, writing the same info to each drive so if one fails you don't lose any data. I have the really important stuff backed up to disk anyway, so this is not an issue.

What I wants is lots of space, accessed as quick as possible... if I have two 120gb drives, I want to use that 240gb of space... not have half of being the same as the other half. Whats the best way to do this.. or is it something as simple as choosing a particular type of set-up when I come to install these babies?

I guess I could go off and find all this stuff on the net, so if any of you want to tell me to bugger off and read the manual, thats ok... I just won't ever talk to you again and not send you christmas cards!

ANd once again, thanks loads for all the rapid relies.

[Bungle]

You need Raid 0 to use the full 240gb... Raid 1 is mirroring where you only use 120gb of you total 240gb. What mobo are you using? as you may be able to set raid up on a number of different controllers

[luap.h]

The basic idea behind RAID is to combine multiple small, inexpensive disk drives into an array which yields performance exceeding that of one large and expensive drive. This array of drives will appear to the computer as a single logical storage unit or drive.

and then people go out any buy big 10k Raptors

The RAID type depends on the capabilities of your RAID controller, which I assume is part of your motherboard? They usually offer RAID 0, RAID 1 or RAID 0/1

check out this chart for quick reference http://www.midwestdatarecovery.com/r...ray-types.html

its going to be either/or with just 2 drives - 120g mirrored or 240g striped

[Blub2k]

Raid 0 with striping.
You should be able to set it up through the sata bios on boot up.
The performance of raid0 will exceed that of just one 120gb drive and you will have access to 240gb approximately.

[directhex]

RAID 0 is a speed increase, you get N drive's worth of space from N drives, but if one drive fails then ALL your data is gone from every drive in the set.

RAID 1 is a reliability increase, where you get N/2 drive's worth of space from N drives. If one drive fails, the other drives will continue working fine, no data will be lost.

RAID 2, 3 and 4 aren't used any more.

RAID 5 is complicated & i've forgotten how it works.

Basically, if you want speed use RAID 0, if you want security use RAID 1

[directhex]

oh, and I'm buying £210 of hard drives soon to give myself a total of 240Gb of useable space in my server (480Gb of drive space, protected via RAID 1)

[Blub2k]

Speed , speed, speed

he likes to live on the edge