Hesitant to use SATA

[MRGOOCH]

I have been very hesitant to use a SATA hard drive as I am not sure what to do other than: Plug the SATA cable to the motherboard and into the PSU.
What other steps do I have to take to complete the setup?

 

[mrcaffeinex]

That is pretty much all you have to do. Windows 7 (the operating system displayed in your signature) supports SATA drives, so you don't need to worry about loading 3rd party drivers like we used to have to do in the Windows XP days.

Good luck and welcome to the age of larger than 500GB HDDs

 

[shortylickens]

Thats it, unless you are doing some RAID.
If the motherboard properly supports it, you can do everything with SATA that you could with PATA only much easier. None of that MASTER/SLAVE nonsense. In fact the BIOS should usually ID your drives faster during POST and also tell you of any issues right away. In the OS they pop up under the Hardware Manager like normal and you can check your IDE channels to see what mode they are in. If you need a little more detailed info I recommend downloading HD Tune. It gives detailed stats and you can also do some basic surface checking and speed tests.

If you have a really old motherboard that was just starting to support SATA, you might not be able to install an OS and boot from it, but I seriously doubt you have one of those.

EDIT:
And I never needed anything special for Windows XP either. If the motherboard finds the drive then so can Windows.

 

[MRGOOCH]

My motherboard is 3 years old and has 2 sataII ports.It states they conform to 3Gb/s standard.

 

[mrcaffeinex]

I have old Gigabyte and ASUS socket A boards that required you to load the SATA drivers from floppy before the Windows XP installation disc would let you choose those drives as the destination for Windows to be installed. Once SP2 came out and I started slipstreaming the installation discs I didn't need to load the driver anymore, but it was a learning experience back then.

 

[her209]

Set your motherboard BIOS to use AHCI mode for the SATA controller and then install Windows.

 

[MRGOOCH]

I already have Win 7 installed.Why reinstall?

 

[dfuze]

That is the beauty of SATA, no more master/slave jumpers!

If it doesn't show up when you boot to windows, you may need to go to Computer Management and format the drive.

 

[mrcaffeinex]

There is no need to reinstall windows. I was operating under the assumption that you would be replacing your primary hard drive with the new SATA drive for increased performance and speed, but you can just add it into the system to use as a storage drive. The above suggestions are all right-on. SATA drives are simply plug and play at this point. In a worst-case scenario, you may need to do what dfuze mentions.

 

[MRGOOCH]

I stand corrected. I would be using it as the operating system.