People,
I wonder whether you can provide me with some information. I currently have two Maxtor 40Gb IDE hard drives and I am rapidly running out of space. As the motherboard I have (Abit NF7-S v2) has serial ATA, I could get a serial ATA hard drive.
Any thoughts on which one to buy? (I am looking for around 120Gb of space)
Also can I still keep my 40Gb drives in the machine as well as the new drive? (Never used SATA before not quite sure how it works)
Any help is much appreciated,
Leon
If you're planning to run 2 ide drives (presumably 1 with the master boot record and OS on) and another SATA drive along with that, i'm not sure if that will work.
Iirc SATA would over ride the IDE channels but there may be an option to run in "hybrid" (i've seen it called that) so you can run SATA alongside your IDE drives, depends on the mobo though.
A decent drive to get would be anything from Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital. I have a 120gb Seagate and that runs really quiet (7200rpm) but my other Western Digital 120gb SATA has the option for either a SATA power connector or a standard molex which is very useful for me as I don't have a SATA power connector in my PSU.
Hope that helps (and hope i'm correct about the SATA over riding IDE)
I would have thought you could quite happily have SATA and IDE drives up and running together! As the two controllers are seperate...
I'm not familiar with the ABIT board, but there are tons of people on here who do, so I'm sure they can give you a definate answer. But in my case, I am using an Epox board and have got a mixture of IDE and SATA drives going (two IDE and one SATA, soon to be two SATA). In the bios I only have the option of disabling or enabling the SATA controller, not for the IDE channels. I also get the option to boot off IDE or SATA.
One thing I did notice though, when installing Windows on the SATA drive, I had to disconnect my IDE drives, as Windows automatically wanted to install on the primary IDE drive. Once installation was finished, I was able to re-connect my IDE drives, and away we go!
Drive wise, I have a Samsung Spinpoint, and I love it... Its sooooo quiet! Though you would need a SATA power connector adapter, as you don't have the molex option like on the WD.
ant
Last edited by Ant; 16-10-2004 at 05:03 PM.
Originally Posted by Big Leon
Seagate or samsung.
btw the new segates are supose to be out soon with a increased amount of cache on them
The SATA will run fine along side good old classic ATA. I have three SATA Seagates, but Samsungs are spoken of highly from what people have told me this last few months.
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Sorry to scare you Big Leon, they say you learn something everyday!
Hehe, let's put it this way: At one point I had IDE, SATA and 2 SCSI cards all running in my rig.
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Thanks very much guys, the help is very much appreciated. I will be ordering the new drive soon.
(I'll let you know which one!)
The controlers on every mobo I have seen have all been seperate. I would very supprised if sata overrided IDE channels because there is noreson forit to be designed to do that... It needs an extra chip to have sata anyway. When the sata finally becomes intergrated into southbridges it may be one or the other but that wont happen for a long while..... a very long while!
Samsungs I have heard a lot of good stuff about. They are suppost to be quiet, and very fast.
Seagate drives are not nearly as quite as they used to be infact id say probably very close to a maxtor, but slower.
WD are suppost to be quieter,or used to be, but are quite niosy.
I would still aviod IBM/hitachi even though there reputation has got a lot better recently.
Annoyingly with sata you cant boot from either sata drive, only the primary sata, atleast on my nf7-s. I belive its becuase of the way the SATA controler is intergrated into the mobo and the bios...probably differnt for others.
Yep basically get a SATA 120GB drive (check www.storagereview.com for reviews and oppinions in the forum/community there).
Your choice fo drive will depend upon whats most important to you price/performance/heat/noise etc. That site gives all the details on all the drives, keeping a huge database of all previous reviews etc.
Keep your existing IDE drives and place them onto any one IDE channel on the board i.e. master / slave. Keep you other CD/DVD drives on the other.
The SATA is on a completely different MB controller, and so sits separate from the IDE. Thus you placing anything on the IDE channels wont interfere.
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