New internal HD - help with SATA

[DearPrudence]

Hi

I hope you can help, and clear up a few points before I buy a new hard drive.

I want to add a SATA internal hard drive.

At the moment I have two WD 320GB hard drives using Ultra DMA IDE/ATA (80 conductors)and a Sony DVD Rewriter and a standard DVD player.

My motherboard is a ASRock 4CoreDual-SATA2

The MB has two SATA connectors.

I'm running XP Pro.

My tower doesn't have anymore room for another HD, so it seems my only option is to fit a caddy where the DVD standard player is.

I did try a Buffalo 1TB USB last week, which did not allow me to partition it - and after I'd tried, it froze my system. So it went straight back to Amazon.

I have three questions.

1) Will a SATA drive still work from the MB if I am also using standard Hard Drives - i.e. IDE/ATA ?

2) I only stumbled on the caddy idea today - do they work okay?

I'm not looking to keep changing drives over - but I cannot see any other way of mounting an extra drive.

2) I fancy a Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black SATA 3Gb/s 7200rpm Drive. Has anyone had a bad experience with this drive?

Many thanks in advance.

Stephen

 

[vacunita]

1) Will a SATA drive still work from the MB if I am also using standard Hard Drives - i.e. IDE/ATA ?

2) I only stumbled on the caddy idea today - do they work okay?

I'm not looking to keep changing drives over - but I cannot see any other way of mounting an extra drive.

2) I fancy a Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black SATA 3Gb/s 7200rpm Drive. Has anyone had a bad experience with this drive?

1. There no reason why they should not. If the Mb has support for them they should work. Make sure the SATA ports are activated in the BIOS, these may be turned off since they aren't being used.

2. Unless you plan on removing, and moving the hard drives between computers, a caddy may be way to much of an overkill. Perhaps something simpler like a pair of mounting rails can accomplish the job cheaper.

http://www.computercablesource.com/drive-mounting-rails-35-to-525-106.html

You might want to look into hard drive fans too if your case is has less then adequate air flow. But it should not really be necessary if the case is properly ventilated.

3. No real experience with that particular drive, but with around 1TB of data hanging around, I would suggest some kind of aggressive backup protocol to go with it. You would not want to have to regenerate 1Tb of information in the event of a crash, and trust me its going to crash as all hard drives eventually tend to do its just a matter of when.

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[BadBigBen]

This goes with vacunita's suggestions...

1. I have a PC that has six IDE drives (four onboard and two over a PCI IDE card) and two SATA drives... so there will be no problem, you have to remember to turn on SATA in the BIOS, and install the SATA drivers (depending on BIOS there may be a setting for the SATA ports to be used as IDE, so the install of drivers may not be needed), before the OS will see them...

2. Yep, I've used those as well, in the above situation...

3. Nope, though we use the GREEN brother more than the Black... where we had problems with, where Hitachi/IBM sensors kept showing a overheat problem (normal to the touch though) which caused certain OS I/O operations to go haywire...


Ben

"If it works don't fix it! If it doesn't use a sledgehammer..."

How to ask a question, when posting them to a professional forum.

 

[paparazi]

Dito with the cooling recommendation and mounting rails to turn a rom bay into a HHD bay are good, again be careful of cooling and 'dead stops' in the case.
32mb Caviar Blacks were late to the 1TB party but are said to be class leading (I've only used Raptors and SE16's to date) There are reports that they run fairly warm and that they are not the best accousticly but performance overall is said to be top draw.
Personally I would say if you want the most benefit from this drive then install as your main boot device and
have the others as storage.
Martin


On wings like angels whispers sweet
my heart it feels a broken beat
Touched soul and hurt lay wounded deep
Brown eyes are lost afar and sleep

 

[wahnula]

WD just announced a new 2TB drive, it's available at Newegg for $299, price should drop after a while, but it's still nice to have so much storage (and bragging rights!).

Many ATX cases have room under the hard drives where a cooling fan sits, plenty of room for one of these:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1580897&Sku=T925-2110

...which can even be modded to handle one or two drives instead of the three. My ATX case was a little small, so I mounted it on the floor of the case once, just behind the lower air intake. Tight, but did fit.

There are also hot-swap bays like this:

http://www.thinkcomputers.org/index.php?x=reviews&id=840

...that allow you to interchange drives quickly if you have extra rail sets.

And, don't forget, in BIOS, to be sure the SATA ports are not only enabled but are not configured for RAID, unless the motherboard needs that to see the drive (some older ones do). Newer BIOSes will have an option to "use RAID as standard IDE" or the like.

Tony

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