Two SATA HDs - Y Data Cable

[Tibal]

I am baffled at the fact that I can not, for the life of me, find anyone who sells or even produces a Y data cable for SATA HDs. I recently bought a new computer and I want to create a Master and Slave scenario with two different HDs so that I can throw Vista on one and XP on the other... just to keep the children from fighting in the back seat Does anyone know where I could find one? I've looked at all of my local retailers as well as just googled it... nothing. Everyone has the Y power cable, but no Y data cable... I would kind of expect this cable to be in existance like it does for IDE hard drives... meh.

 

[foozy]

Uh, I've personally never seen one - why would you need it? Most motherboards come with plenty of SATA ports.

 

[Tibal]

Re: Motherboard SATA ports

Surely enough, mine, built by Dell, only has one.

 

[N3051M]

there is no such thing as a master/slave thing for sata hdds, it automatically assigns the role as needed.

i don't think such cable you're asking for exist, not to my knowledge.

if you run out of sata ports and need more, then you can get IDE > Sata adapters or a PCI controller cards to give you extra ports.

 

[Rick]

I have seen power Y splitters, but actual data cables.... No.

I don't think they exist. If they do exist, you probably wouldn't want one anyway.

As I understand it, the high-speed nature of SATA (Or just about any other serial bus) would degrade the signal for both devices substantially if split. I imagine this is why SATA is said to be "point-to-point".

However, there are SATA (female) to IDE (male) converters that work very well. You might be able convert a SATA drive to IDE and plug it in as a master or slave on one of your extra IDE channels... You do have IDE channels, right?

 

[Tibal]

Re:Myself

To answer the question about the IDE channels... I do have one... though I'm pretty certain its set up for a floppy drive, if I were to ever want to install one. I'm not sure if I could run a HD through it though. In regards to the adaptor, I actually did buy an IDE to SATA adaptor... didn't do a damn thing though, for some reason my BIOS wouldn't even recognize it as a valid HD, but whatever.. another item I get to return to my "local" CompUSA ... about 14 miles away.

Today in my adventures of trying to find a solution, I stopped by my local Fry's Electronics and was told that SATA is not built to do Y connections. SATA works as one cable to one port... that's it. In order to set up differenet SATA HDs you have to either have more ports or purchase RAID cards to add ports to the comp.

I'm not about ready to spend the (min) 40 bucks for one of the PCI slot cards in addition to a new hard drive I think I'll just stick with my 250 gig and attempt a dual boot with XP at some point in time.

Thanks anyways and hopefully this helps someone else.

 

[Samstoned]

Surely enough, mine, built by Dell, only has one.

gotta love those dells