what do i need for an SATA drive to work?

if i order a Seagate 7.7200 80gb SATA drive, what else will i need for it to work on my NF7-S v2..

special power cable of some sort?

;) Just a std SATA power cable. You should get the SATA data cable included with your mobo which has (2) SATA interface built in onboard coutesy of SIL3112 (Silicon Image). Don't expect any perf boost at all, mostly just nicer cables and very low CPU usage at the mo. I think Abit are still working out some wrinkles, I've used the latest v1.9 BIOS and nVidia drivers (2.46?) and still think my Maxtor ATA133 7200-8 was superior to my SATA Maxtor (alledgedly the best SATA outside of the hugely priced Raptor). If you get the Maxtor SATA drive you don't even need the SATA power lead as you can also use the std IDE power leads from the PSU.

Yeah unless you get a 10k sata disk you wont notice that much different.

who sells the power cables!!?

cheers.


-i know the performance increase will be negligable, but i've filled up my IDE ports :)

-edit

found them here. http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/sata_cables.html

Where, is it indicated anywhere that SATA uses less CPU % than IDE (UDMA)?

On a side note, I am convinced that the 7K250 is the best 7200RPM drive right now (SATA/PATA) - Storagereview and Tom's Hardware (not that I use the later often) seem to agree on that.
It is not as noisy as the WD as well..

Too bad the only place I've seen them so far has been Dabs (no problem with that, just there is no one to compare the price to).

Quote:

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Originally posted by TooNice
Where, is it indicated anywhere that SATA uses less CPU % than IDE (UDMA)?

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:) It's a well known fact. Each iteration of ATA (33, 66, 100, 133) lower the amount of CPU usage they need to function and SATA150 takes this further by adding a special controller which does much of the processing previously done by the CPU. Idle with IE minimised and AV + Firewall running my CPU usage is around 0-4%, defragging (which inherently involves some CPU processing) only raises it to around 2-7%, that's low.

Yep I can concur, my sata raid array idles at much lower processor now its sata rather than pata.

TiG

sata can double ur speed if it's mirrored, see the sata config hotkey after post.

i have an nf7-s and winz can't see it in my computer, only as a maxtor in system panel. anyone know why? i asked komplett for a 160 gb samsung and i got a 12gb maxtor as well, ida, wont install or anything, plus i'm ginger. OKAY?