Will my MOBO support a SATA drive?

[tyleronline]

I was thinking of buying the 400gb seagate drive but im not sure whether it would work with my motherboard? (an AsRock 775i65GV). How easy would the drive be to install and will i need to but any extras with the drive to get it working? Cheers

 

[Jimbo420]

Well does your board have SATA ports on it. Then the next thing to check would be if it does have SATA ports on it is the drive that you have picked out SATA or SATA2, and what is supposed by the board you have

 

[tyleronline]

After consulting my MOBO's website it appears to have 2 x Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s connectors but i can't seeem to see if it supports SATA 2 or not! The drive I am thinking of buying is the one in my link near the bottom of the page but i can't tell if its sata 2 or not. Thanks for the help so far

 

[Jimbo420]

If it doesn't say specificlly that it is SATA2 then it isn't. Look at that link that you have up there. The drive that you are talking about just says SATA and the one below it says SATA2. So as long as your Motherboard has SATA ports on it you should be all good.

Don't forget thought if you are going to install windows on there you are going to need a floppy with the SATA drivers for your board (Should have come with it if you have SATA Ports) other wise windows won't pick up your drive.

 

[tyleronline]

I going to use the drive for storing and playing back audio/video so i wont be installing the os on it! Do i just connect it up to my MOBO and thats it or are there software changes that need to be made aswell? cheers

 

[Jimbo420]

I have never actaully mixed drives on a system like that. I would think that you just need to go into your Bios make sure the SATA controller is turned on and plug the drive in and then confirm that everything is showing up properly, then of course just format it and start using it. Although I could be wrong about that.

Maybe some else that knows for sure if you can mix PATA Drives and SATA Drives on one system will chime in here.

 

[Vigilante]

You will need drivers in Windows for the SATA to work. Often actually called IDE drivers or SCSI or RAID drivers.
If those drivers are in place, XP will treat the drive like any other drive. You'll have to use Disk Manager to partition and format it at that point.

 

[Tedster]

you can, but ensure your OS is on your PATA (IDE) drive. Windows really doesn't like using both at time same time as it gets confused or "hangs" sometimes. I recommend using 100% of one or the either, but not mixing as windows defaults to IDE.

If you mix, put your OS on the IDE, you will lose speed (which is the whole reason for going SATA), but you won't risk crashing or hangups due to driver and OS bugs.

 

[Vigilante]

I've got the opposite mix. I have my OS on a 120gb SATA and a second 40gb IDE.

It works just fine (apparently), but then, I don't often do anything on the IDE except to back stuff up occasionally. Haven't had any issues thus far.

 

[tyleronline]

About these drivers, how do I find out if I have them allready and where can I get them from if don't? I was planning to have all of my programs and OS on my current IDE drive (a seagate drive) and the new drive would be for audio and video files. I have a partition on my IDE drive which I plan to merge into one with Partition Magic. Would there be problems if I split a program between the two drives? For example I have Kontakt 2, a sampler program. The program would be on the IDE drive but the samples would be stored on the SATA drive as they are about 30gb in size. Thanks for all the reponses guys!

 

[Vigilante]

You can "split" a program up no problem. If you're talking about installing the program on IDE and saving the data on SATA, that's good, that's ideal. If your OS drive ever crashes, you still have your data on the other.

To see about the driver. Right-click My Computer, choose Properties. Hardware tab, Device Manager button. Look through that list for anything that says "unknown" or has a question mark, exclamation mark or red X on it. In other, anything out of the ordinary. If everything is good, you'll just have a clean list of stuff. If you have a category that is unknown hardware, look in that, you should not have such a category.
For example, on my computer, my sata controller is in the "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" category.

If you DO have something out of place, that's a driver issue that should be resolved.

The other way to tell is just plug in the SATA drive, then see if Windows finds it or not.

good luck

 

[Samstoned]

I never had issue with a mix with sata booting or the ide booting
its in the motherboard bios
if good board no known issues
I would not buy 1 big drive
get yourself 2 smaller ones your data will thank you
and ya if your using it as 2nd drive no sense in going with sata2


Good Luck