HELP Installing A Sata HD!

[akaivan]

I recently purchased a western digital 160 gig hardrive from newegg for my new build.... It was OEM so it came by itself and no cd's. Anyways i just installed it and its formatting right now on my new build... Except formatting is taking a while.. and im not sure if i installed raid. I press f6 when it asked to install raid then it came to insert cd or press this if you dont have a cd or something like that.. so i i just clicked enter and now its formatting.. Not sure if i did the right thing but someone told me it only takes like a minute to format a sata hardrive. Please Help!

Im using the pc right now.. Seems to be fine.. Will a sata hardrive even work withought Raid installed? if so.. i dont think i installed RAID.. any help?

 

[akaivan]

any helllP? my pc seems to be running fine just i expected it to be faster.. still feels like my p4. 2.4 ghz 1 gb ram machine. but owelll

 

[Tedster]

raid is only done with more than 1 hard disc (usually of the same type). Otherwise your SATA drive will work just like a regular hard drive.

 

[red-vex]

I have installed win xp on maxtor sata 2 hd just like i would on a pata hd (or IDE). Perhaps you've heard about the quick format option (which i used btw)

 

[akaivan]

hmm intresting.. so if i get another hard rive sata similar to the one i am using right now how much faster will it be?

 

[red-vex]

I assume, but I'm not sure at all, that 2 SATA workin together are better than a SATA and an EIDE doin the same thing for the overall greater speed and lower access time.

 

[Phantombadger]

a 160gb drive should only take around 20-30 min to format. it is around 3 times faster than an IDE drive. as for working faster with 2 drives, you wont notice any big difference unless you are moving files from one to the other. And if you want to get technical you could go with RAID 0 on 2 sata drives which could give you a boost, but with day to day operations you wont see much of a difference with a 7200rpm drive. you will only see a huge jump if you go from IDE to a 10,000rpm SATA. As for now the only reason to goto sata is airflow, as the cables are much smaller and to follow the trend so you dont get stuck in the dark ages like the scsii users, j/k scsii has its uses still.

 

[akaivan]

okie dokie. this 160 gb western digital was amazing for the price

 

[Phantombadger]

they are Cheap now, but if you think about it for twice the price you can get a 500gb Drive. that a much better deal.