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Adding an HD...PATA, SATA, RAID???

I

imported_blip

Senior member
OK, I'm adding a second HD, and here's the situation: I don't have an available IDE port, as both are filled with my HD and DVDRW; I have 2 SATA ports; there's always USB.
What's the best solution? I would like to go internal; is there a downside to having 2 drives on one IDE cable, master/slave style? If I buy a SATA drive, do I have to go RAID, or can I just use it like a regular drive? (I don't know much about SATA/RAID, so I wasn't sure if I had to at least do RAID 0 with 2 drives.)
thanks!
 
You don't have to use RAID with SATA drives. I'd go SATA for the slimmer cable. That's the only real difference in interfaces (other than possible improvements with optical drive reading/writing speeds).

Newer drives are almost all SATA, which means the faster drives are SATA for the most part. However there's nothing at all wrong with IDE ones, especially if you're only going for little sub 250Gig ones.

You sure you've only got one IDE port? You can have two devices on each channel you know. That's 4 devices.
 
Thanks for the advice. I'll probably go with SATA.
As for IDE ports, I have 2, each with 1 device (HD and DVDRW). Is there any performance issue with putting 2 devices in one port, such as having both HD's on one cable? Or having the DVDRW and an HD on one cable?
 
If you choose to add a second IDE hard drive, you can add it to the first by changing the jumper on the back of the drive to "slave" mode and (refer to the hard disk documentation) and then hooking it up to the black connector on your ribbon cable (the blue connector plugs into the motherboard, the gray for your primary drive). This will work just fine. I have no hard data as to the performance, but I have used such a setup before and wasn't aware of any performance penalty. If you are worried about the performance hit, I would just get the one SATA drive to complement your original drive. Just be aware (depending on your board) that you may have to load the motherboard SATA drivers (or "RAID drivers") even if using only one SATA drive. --The infamous 'press F6 to install additional drivers' while loading Windows-- My ASUS A8V-E Deluxe required such an install to utilize any of the SATA ports.
 
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