Question about SATA Hard Drives - First Time

CompGuy18

Junior Member
Mar 20, 2007
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I have the asus A8V Deluxe Motherboard. I currently have two maxtor Ultra16 320 GB ATA/133 hard drives. Im about to buy a 500GB SATA hard drive and I was wondering if I could get a little information on how this works. I have never used a SATA drive before. How do I go about setting up the system with the SATA drive as the master and the two maxtor drives with IDE?

Thanks.
 

John

Moderator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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You would typically change the HDD boot device priority in the motherboard bios.
 

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
39,477
20,155
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CompGuy18: SATA drives are technically neither master or slave, they are on their own channel. At the simplest, you just have to plug it in. The IDE drives will be on the IDE controller, set them up as usual. If you are configuring devices for boot, John is right on.
 

Zolty

Diamond Member
Feb 7, 2005
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SATA drives rock, I can't believe it took me until 2 months ago to switch.
 

CompGuy18

Junior Member
Mar 20, 2007
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One more question I forgot to ask. One of my maxtor drives is ATA 100 and the other is ATA 133. Is there a large difference in speed with those? Should I upgrade the one to 133?
 

Cr0nJ0b

Golden Member
Apr 13, 2004
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meettomy.site
Use my time tested method.

Buy the product

Throw out the instructions with distain, before reading of course.

Use intuition to figure out where the item should be installed...

Plug in all of the cables that come with it. using intuition to figure out what goe where.

Then turn the system back on...go into the bios and root around there for a while until the answer hits you.

It's generally the most fun way to discover new technology.

But if you want the short cut...some might say, just read the instructions that come with the drive. If you bought an OEM drive, then do this:

Mount the drive in the case. It should fit the same way as your IDE drives.

Plug the 4 pin power cable into the drive...unless the drive doesn't have a 4-pin connector.

If it doesn't have a 4-pin it will likely have a flat SATA power connector...if you bought a retail drive, it will probably come with an adapter for power. Your Power supply, if it's new might have a SATA power cable as well.

Now, connect the red (they are almost always red) flat SATA cable to any of the SATA plugs on the motherboard. The connectors are right next to the single blue IDE connector on the bottom left of the boards (near the power switch connector block). Pick any of the connectors...it won't really matter which.

Close up the system and boot into the BIOS.

I'm not sure exaclty what your bios will look like, but you need to find an area that talks about disk drives and your promise raid controller. The SATA devices are managed through the promise chip, so that needs to be turned on. Then you need to make sure that all of the ports are active for either RAID or SATA. This option might not be present for you. Then save and reboot. You should now see a second screen come up after the initial boot screen. this is the promise RAID bios. hit f10 and enter that config. Here you should be able to select the SATA drive and you should be able to set it up as either a stand alone...or a single RAID 0 stripe with one disk. I don't think there is a difference in that choice. Once that is complete you should reboot and Windows will recognize your new drive...assuming that you have setup the promise drivers in XP.

Some things to note. If you are planning to build a RAID set, you can, I believe mix IDE and SATA on your board...don't do that....setup your RAID groups as all SATA or ALL IDE, you wouldn't want an IDE drive slowing down your SATA group. (not sure if this is even allowed in the BIOS). If you are trying to set this up as a new boot drive and you want your Windows to boot from this drive you will need to set it up as "bootable" in the bios and you will need to jump through some hoops in the initials Windows installation. hit f6 during the install and have drivers ready.

hope it all works out.
 

stevf

Senior member
Jan 26, 2005
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There isnt enough difference between 100 and 133 to worry about if both drives are of sufficient capacity for you then upgrading the one would be a waste