SATA for Primary Drive?

[EglsFly]

I have never built a system using a SATA hard drive before and am considering it.
Is the performance now up to par with a good EIDE setup like the WD Special Edition EIDE hard drives?

The system will use an Asus P4P800 motherboard and would like to know if I can use a Serial ATA Hard Drive for the primary and only drive? (will not be using any raid functions)
Does the SATA setup on this motherboard allow it to function identical and full replacement for the EIDE hard disk?

I'd like to get a drive that is about 80GB.
Newegg has three available:
>MAXTOR 80GB 7200RPM SATA HARD DRIVE MODEL # 6Y080M0
>Seagate 80GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive Cuda 7200 ST380013AS
>Seagate 80GB 7200rpm SATA Hard Drive Barracuda V ST380023AS

Any gotcha's that I need to know about?
Suggestions, comments?
Thanks!

 

[stevennoland]

EglsFly, I don't know much about that mobo. If it has the ICH5R southbridge with support for SATA RAID, I would get two WD 'Raptors' and run them in a RAID 0 array. You will see marked improvement in load times. You'll have a few gigs less, but come on, are you really gonna need all that space any way? The RPM on the drives you listed doesn't compare to the 10,000 RPM on the Raptors.Good luck.

 

[pspada]

I've got a Maxtor 80gig SATA drive as the primary in one of my systems, and it works great. It's very fast - at least as fast as any ATA133 drive I've seen. But it is also completely silent, does not make any noticable noise whatsoever.

But Win2K appears to be a bit fragile when using the drive.

 

[MDE]

It'll work, but you'll need the SATA drivers on a floppy and load them during Windows setup (when it says to press F6 for a third party RAID\SCSI driver)

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: stevennoland
EglsFly, I don't know much about that mobo. If it has the ICH5R southbridge with support for SATA RAID, I would get two WD 'Raptors' and run them in a RAID 0 array. You will see marked improvement in load times. You'll have a few gigs less, but come on, are you really gonna need all that space any way? The RPM on the drives you listed doesn't compare to the 10,000 RPM on the Raptors.Good luck.

I'd get a 120GB or 160GB 8MB cache SATA 7200 RPM drive. Or two of them in RAID. Equal performance to any Paralled IDE setup, and a good price. You'll have a bit slower performance than the 10,000 RPM raptors, but come on, do you really need all that performance anyways? See, stevennoland, it works both ways .

 

[AndyHui]

If it's a single SATA drive without using the RAID functions on the ICH5, installation of any OS is transparent, and exactly the same as you would for a parallel drive.

No drivers are needed in any way to be loaded during installation.

If you do encounter problems, simply switch the ICH5 operation mode to Compatibility instead of Enhanced in the BIOS, and ensure that SATA is set to first drive.

The SATA connections are simply listed as the 3rd and 4th controller on the ICH5 (simply as the primary and secondary parallel controllers are listed as 1st and 2nd).