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SATA Drives
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Posted by: Fatbloke

Simple question I know - but not been able to find a definitive answer...

My PC's Mobo supports IDE of course and has 2 Serial-ATA ports.

Now that all the IDE cables are in use (2xHDs 2xOptical Drives), if I wanted to add more HD's can I just buy a SATA drive and plug it straight into the SATA port? Will it conflict with the existing drives in any way?

Hope someone can help :D

Posted by: iankb

Unless your BIOS shows more than four drive slots in it's configuration, I expect that the serial drives are driven by a separate controller that will show up as SCSI drives in the OS. Either way, I would expect to be able to use both at the same time. You may have to alter the boot sequence if you want to boot off a 'SCSI' drive. At least this is the way that my separate Promise RAID controller works.

Posted by: Fatbloke

Ah, cheers for that! No, not bothered about booting, but might need some more storage space if I want to do some video editing.

Posted by: shady

I'd actually heard the opposite answer on a Dell forum.

I've got a Dell motherboard that supports SATA, amd I wanted to do exactly the same as you, but reading some posts on the dell forum implied that you had to use one or the other.

Now, you can't believe everything you read on the internet :confused: so I'd love to hear how you get on.

Posted by: iankb

I have an Asus P4PE, and the manual seems to state that you can use all three IDE connectors on the motherboard, either in a RAID configuration or separately.

It will depend on the BIOS and the SATA controller, so a Dell may not be the same.

Posted by: tonering

It depends on the motherboard, and I'm not at all familiar with the A7V8X. If you have access to the usenet groups, there is an excellent Asus site that can answer your questions. You can find them at:
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus

I've got the Asus P4P800 dlx and it will handle up to six drives, 2 S-ATA and 4 IDE.

Posted by: Fatbloke

Can SATA drives be chained in some way? Seems a bit stingy if mobos have only 2 SATA ports, suggesting that it's not possible to replicate your EIDE setup under SATA. With EIDE you only get two ports, but can have 2 drives off each port.

Posted by: iankb

If they have standard IDE controllers as well, current motherboards seem to be restricted to two serial drives. You could partition larger drives to emulate a four-drive IDE setup, or you could add a PCI SATA (or SATA/RAID) controller card.

Normally, you aren't using four ATA drives because you're also using at least one ATAPI CD-ROM drive. These still need the parallel ATA interface.

Posted by: gblades

I have a gigabyte motherboard which has 2 IDE channels, 2 IDE RAID channels and SATA. The RAID and SATA appear as SCSI.

When you include SCSI in the boot order there is an additional setting to select whether SCSI booting should be done with an external SCSI PCI card, RAID, or SATA.

Posted by: Paul Stimpson

FB,

Do you have a free Firewire or USB2.0 port? If so have you thought about using an external drive enclosure? We tend to do that as it makes collaboration and safe storage of projects-in-progress much easier (take the drive off the machine and put it in the safe) as well as easing future expansion and reallocation of storage.

If you're short on ports Dabs do an own brand "DabsValue" (in reality a Lucent) firewire card for pocket-money prices.

Cheers,
Paul.

Posted by: Fatbloke

Do external drives require power supplies, or do they run off of the usb/fw cable power? I'm loathed to put my already glowing mains leads under even more pressure :) Actually, I have no spare plug sockets nearby, so it would be usefull not to need yet another adapter!

Posted by: iankb

I'm sure that a standard IDE drive in an external housing would require an external power supply. However, a battery-driven device that includes a usable hard drive won't. e.g. I can use my Apple iPod as a portable hard drive, driven by its own power supply and/or the power on the interface. With USB 2 and/or Firewire available, the transfer speeds are remarkably good.

Posted by: iankb

I use standard (non-SATA) hard drives in exchangeable drive bays, which you can get from Maplins. They are not hot-swappable, so you do need to power-down the PC to add or remove them.

They are useful for booting off alternate operating systems and, with the help of Norton's Ghost, getting perfect backups with no locked OS files.

You have to make sure that you have enough depth in your PC case to use exchangeable bays, since they project backwards a bit and usually include their own cooling fan at the rear.

Posted by: Paul Stimpson

quote:
Originally posted by Fatbloke
Do external drives require power supplies, or do they run off of the usb/fw cable power? I'm loathed to put my already glowing mains leads under even more pressure :) Actually, I have no spare plug sockets nearby, so it would be usefull not to need yet another adapter!

There are some and some...

Desktop enclosures for 3.5" drives normally either have built-in power supplies or external plug-cap PSUs as they are too power-hungry for the USB or Firewire bus to supply.

"Pocket" ultra-portable enclosures with 2.5" drives may have external PSUs, be bus powered or be able to run off either (check the specs). USB always has power however Firewire ports on laptops normally are the 4-pin connector (which has no power pins to supply the drive - Those are only present on the full-sized 6-pin connector.) It's not uncommon for bus-powered drives to also have an external power supply in case you need to connect them to an unpowered interface or hub.

I like external USB2 and Firewire drives as they are easy to move from machine to machine, can be hotplugged, are automatically recognised by both Linux and Windows without the need for drivers, don't need the BIOS settings to be tweaked and, on my machine (which has a new BIOS) I can boot off them too.

If I've got more than one Firewire port on a desktop then I tend to go for firewire. On a laptop with only one Firewire port I prefer USB2.0 as I can stream captured DV video from the firewire port straight onto the USB drive without having to resort to Firewire hubs.

Cheers,
Paul.

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