Can a p4p800 mobo run with just an SATA hd...

[Sentinelk9]

I'm trying to figure out if I can get the mobo (Asus p4p800) to work with just an S-ATA 120Gb Seagate HD. I tried reading the manual for the mobo (I haven't gotten the components yet... I want to make sure before I get them) but it doesn't really say much. But there seems to be an error message listed that says "no hard-drive found on IDE."

So I'm confused.... do I need an HD on the IDE even if I have a HD on SATA ???

 

[fredtam]

Yes you can run just one sata hd.

 

[Sentinelk9]

So I can just have the SATA on the primary SATA port and connect up the CD/dvd drives to the primary IDE right?

Also I got another question.... whats the whole thing with enabling RAID and stuff like that for an S-ATA HD?

What is the use of RAID settings... how do they optimize HD access? Will they work with regular S-ATA HD's or do u need special types of HDs?

 

[fredtam]

First if your just going to use one hard drive disable raid rom in the onchip serial ata section of the bios. Yes the cd rom will go on the ide channel.

The ICH5R on the p4p800supports raid 0. This allowws you to increase performance by striping the data over both hard drives (simple explanation. For this you would need two identical hard drives.

 

[Sentinelk9]

ah so raid stuff is to optimize data transfer for multiple HDs with similar architechtures?

 

[fredtam]

Correct.