New SATA Hdd?

[14k]

I'm looking to get a new hard drive since everyday I seem to be burning DVD-Rs and CD-Rs trying to make more space.

I'm thinking I might aswell get one of these SATA drives right? I'm pretty sure my motherboard supports it. It's an Asus A7V8X, and I've seen these thin plastic-like pink cables inside my case which I'm quite certain are for these SATA drives?

My question is, will I be able to mount this SATA drive and simply plug in the SATA cable? Is it plug and play, kind of like USB devices? Currently all 4 of my IDE channels are being used (120 hdd, DVD+-RW, CD-RW, DVD-ROM). Will this pose a problem? Ideally, I would like to get a 250GB SATA drive and copy everything over from the current 120GB drive so that the new 250GB SATA drive becomes the main drive from which the computer boots from.

Thanks in advance.

 

[StraightPipe]

SATA would be sweet, but if your concerned about $$$ I would just take out the DVD-ROM and put in a huge IDE harddrive (8mb)

Unless you really need the slight perfomance increase that sata will offer the IDE is gonna be just as effective, and you wont need a controller card (with you mobo, you might not need a cont card anyway)

 

[14k]

Thanks, but what about installing the SATA hdd?

Do I need to configure anything? My 4 IDE drives will be unaffected?

 

[beatle]

You don't need to configure anything. Just have your driver disk handy when you load the OS. Drive letter assignment can be a little weird when it comes to different drive interfaces. A primary master ide drive will want to be C:. There's probably a more technical way to do it, but I always just unplug my ide harddrive before installing the OS to my SATA drive. Then I just plug it back in afterwards and it assigns it the next available drive letter.