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PATA / SATA question

P

paxman

Member
I have had WD PATA drives for several years now. Currently I am looking to upgrade my system -which will include a HD upgrade. I am wondering if I can combine PATA and SATA drives? I am assumming not. I am purchasing a DFI Lanparty board/AMD components. Are you either all PATA or all SATA? I would like (if possible) to hang on to my older WD PATA drives if possible.
 
You can combine drives. You can even set up PATA/SATA in RAID arrays together with the nForce 4/ULTRA/SLI chipsets.

Unless the drives you have are very very old, I don't see the problem.
 
Thanks! The WDs I have are a couple years old, but hopefully they will work.

So if I understand you correctly, I can have four ATA devices (two DVD, two PATA HD drives) and add a SATA HD? It would be nice to be able to attach all five components without having to put in a ATA card.
 
Depending on your motherboard, you said DFI, so I'm going to assume you mean LANPARTY ULTRA-D or so.

You can have any four IDE and any four SATA devices all connected at once. So that can be six hard drives and two optical, or whatever.

What I was saying before though, was that not only can you add all those drives, but you can even RAID together any mix you want, on any of the channels. If you don't know what RAID is than it probably won't help you anyways. 😉
 
Thanks for the info. Yes...I am looking at the Lanparty Ultra/Non SLI board.

I do know what RAID is, however, up until this point I had never had an interest in setting one up. I will have two 100 Gb WD PATA drives and a new 250 Gb SATA drive (hopefully). What do you recommend doing with RAID with the three drives? Can you point me to some information on how to easily set it up?

I am fairly proficient with computer hardware...but I have never built a SATA/RAID system (been two years since my last upgrade).
 
I doubt you'll have much of a use for RAID at this point. RAID-0 or striping sometimes increases speeds in limited situations, but for you I'd say it's unecessary really. RAID-1 or mirroring may be even less so. I doubt you have a real need for a mirrored disk as a normal desktop user, right?

I'd either put the two 100GB drives in RAID-0 and expect very little performance gain, but at least that way you have one 200GB drive and one 250GB drive, instead of three. You can possibly fit more that way depending on the file sizes you deal with. Or just use all three alone.

As far as Windows is concerned, if you're going to use all the drives alone, you don't need any special drivers during installation, but if doing RAID from the very beginning, you may need to use an included floppy disk or downloaded floppy off the internet to install drivers along with Windows.

Which drive will be the system drive?
 
I normally try to keep the smallest drive as my main OS drive...however because my 2 100 GB drives are going on two years old...I was thinking of making the new SATA drive my main OS drive and the other two backups for photos and files. I do a lot of video editing so having the extra space on the main C drive would be nice.

It sounds like RAID really isn't going too provide much in the way of speed gains. I am really not that interested in RAID for backup...just as a speed bump. I back my stuff up on DVD and by moving copies of very valuable stuff (digital photos, etc.) to other physical hard drives in case of a HD failure. It wouldn't bother me too much having three seperate physical drives... I also do a lot of gaming...

I appreciate the advice...

 
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