To SATA or not to SATA...that is the question.

[newzguy54]

I have a low end computer that needs more drive space. It has a sata controller so I could add a large sata drive....but are they any drawbacks. What if I have to format this drive in dos.....does dos see sata drives? What about drive cloning? Should I stick with tried and true pata?

I understand their power requirements are less ...which is good because I only have a 300watt power supply in my hp desktop. Would it make more sense to go exteral usb?

 

[secretanchitman]

doesnt really matter. ive always used sata/ide winxp pro installs without a problem. if you really are feeling scared that it wont install, just get an IDE drive. you wont see any slower performance. basically the cabling is different and thats about it.

 

[Harvey]

I've used Norton Ghost to clone SATA drives from a DOS boot floppy so it definitely recognizes large SATA drives, but for DOS only applications, you may want to stick with a PATA drive for a couple of reasons:

1. Depending on the age of your computer and the version of DOS you're using, your system may not support even the smallest SATA drive you can buy. See this article on Microsoft's support pages.
   
   Under DOS 7 in Win 98), the original limit that FDISK could recognize was 64 GB. You can extend that with this newer version of FDISK that extends the limit to 137 GB.
   
   You may be able to use a drive larger than 137 GB, but you may have to use other software, such as Partition Magic, to partition the drive before you can do so.
   
2. It's difficult to imagine coming close to using a drive that large for DOS only applications.

I hope that helps.

 

[rdp6]

I can't say anything about SATA in DOS, but I can say that I just installed Windows XP on a newly built system with only SATA drives (hard drive and burner), and that I didn't have to install any third-party drivers/controller software when running the XP installer. I was surprised about that, thought I was going to have to temporarily install a floppy drive.

Nothing fancy, just at $80 320GB SATA 2 hard drive, no RAID. The motherboard default was IDE mode for SATA drives, worked just fine.