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Should I use my new SATA as my OS drive

P

patrick24601

Member
I just bought a sweet 320G SATA drive from a guy on here. I am reading up on what SATA is and is not good for and now I want your opinion.

Should I make this SATA drive my OS drive and use the old IDE for data? I am a SATA noob so be gentle
 
Hi,


A SATA HD is still just a HD.


The new HD may be faster, but if you already have a working OS on your old drive I'd leave that alone and make the SATA a data drive.


Peter
 

Just to show that there are proponents for both sides of any issue, I did shift my OS to a new 320 GB drive on my four year old PC. It is much faster now, particularly on boot. I also turned my old twin 40 GB drives into a RAID-1 array for data. I found that the drive manufacturers usually include software to facilitiate this OS transfer (without the need for any reinstallation). If yours does too, then I say: why not?
 
Thanks all.

Just in case I DO decide to do this.. how do I handle the order of drives (SATA noob). With IDE you have primary, secondary, master, slave. How do I 'arrange' my drives now to get the new SATA drives to be seen 'before' the IDE drive? Are there jumpers on that drive ?

TIA
 
Most drives now a days have a auto detecton them. As well, SATA drives cables only have one hook up point (as far as I know) so you can only do one drive to one sata port (Port 0 or 1 = drive 1). hope you can get it going.

BTW. This is a highly technical forum, Meaning that the disscussion would have to be like How SATA works or what does a Black Hole look like from the inside. It is very confusing that it's here and not at the bottem. Anyways for future reference something like this would go in the General Hardware board or Technical support board (I would put it in General hardware as the most people go there).
 

If you have the manufactruer's software that facilitates the copying of the OS partition to the SATA drive, then it should also make that SATA partition the C: drive (at least it's true for the Western Digital).
 
I probably won't copy the OS - I prefer a clean install. In that case how do I tell my machine to use my SATA drive as my primary boot device? Or will Windows do that when I install a new OS from the CD? In my BIOS I only get to pick that my hard disk is the primary boot device. I don't get to pick which hard disk.

Sorry for the basic questions.
 
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