Sata + Ata?

[Krynn72]

Ok heres the deal. I was building a computer out of spare parts for my sister and I had to order a hard drive. I messed up and ordered a SATA drive which the motherboard cant use. So instead of getting a controller card or whatever I just buy another drive and figure I can use the SATA drive in my computer (my mobo can do SATA).

Right now I have a 300gig IDE drive, which I have no intention of abandoning. However, I would like to format everything and make the SATA drive my primary. Now I have never set up a SATA drive before, and I want to know im not getting my self into some deep ***t right before schools starts

So here are the questions I have

1. How do I set up the SATA as primary (with windows installed on it) and IDE as slave (for storage). Do I need to change jumpers? Bios settings? ect?

2. What is this RAID buisness? Do I need to use it? What will I gain if I do?

3. If I do use RAID, how do I set it up with a SATA and IDE disk?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Adabiviak]

...you may be reading more into it than there really is. I put the install CD in my SATA drive and off it went. I have different installations of XP installed on an IDE drive, a SATA drive, and XP64 on the SCSI drive. I've not ventured into RAID territory yet myself though.

 

[giant384]

to make sata primary all you do is make the ide hard drive slave. to do this change the pin that is near all of the connectors to cable select(where to put the pin is said in the manual) but connect the the slave part of the ide cable not the master.

 

[Asus]

Primary or Slave just lets the PC know which drive is which when ATA drives share a cable. SATA drives do not have Primary/Slave options. They only have 1 cable per drive. You can leave your other drive as is just put the Windows Disc in and select your SATA drive when installing windows. If it can't see the drive in the list then restart the install and 'specifiy drivers' (F6) when the windows install starts again. Have the SATA drives on a floppy disc.

If you still have windows installed on your old drive but want it only to boot from the SATA drive then go into bios and set boot priority to the SATA drive.

 

[giant384]

yes but ata will default to master if both are set to master i have my sata on master and the ide on slave

 

[Revisedsoul]

the thing is giant, that all sata are masters no matter what, because its is its own channel.
master and slave on each ide channel just lets the computer know there are 2 possible drives, there no advantage to one being slave and the other being master. hell you could install xp on the slave and it wouldnt matter

all that matters is that when you install xp you choose the sata drive

if you raid you want to have 2+ disks of the same size(ata or sata not one and the other) bennifits could be faster transfer faster reading, better security if one drive fails and such