ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet Is anyone here familiar with.....

Setting up a single SATA drive in a computer?

I bought a new mother-board some months back, it is a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H, with a Dual Core Intel CPU.

Now this MB, has support for 1 IDE HDD, which I have the MBR installed on.
All of the other on-board storage sockets are for SATA drives.
I have a DVD burner/drive and a new Western Digital 500GB HDD I would like to install.

No matter how many times I have read the manual (a PDF these days), it is written in such a way that I'll be blowed if I can understand what on earth they are on about.

From what I can work out, I don't have to create a RAID array, for the one HDD, but is the DVD unit included in what could be called an array?

I've been putting off installing this gear for about 6 weeks, as you only get one chance to do this properly, without affecting the current IDE HDD.

Can someone please HELP!!!!

I've never had to work with SATA before, I wish I didn't have to now either.

BTW, there was a mention of having to make a floppy disk, with some data on it, my computer does not have one of these sorts of drives, neither do most newer computer these days, how do you get around this?

Regards,
Mike.

Mike,
I recently installed a 2nd, ITB Seagate SATA in my dual core XP machine. Seagate's installation CD made it easier than I expected. My goal was to have it as a copy destination for important files and to direct all the large video captures to it. All of my programs still run from the C drive. Are you going to use yours for mass storage or do you wish to mirror your existing drive? I think that you will be pleased with how it turns out. I think you can make a boot CD like you used to make a floppy.
Joe

Just plug it in and go... RAID is for setting up multiple hard drives for redundancy. Many SATA boards come with on-board RAID support, whereas you previously had to use third-party software.

You shouldn't need any floppies, most OSes these days come with bootable CDs. Your BIOS is probably set up to boot from CD by default also.

Most of these boards with SATA also have the regular IDE controller and you can go into BIOS to decide who will be the boot device if you have both installed. That will be the C:. This could be handy if you wanted 2 operating systems. Right now I have one drive set up as native DOS and the other is W/98. When I finally get around to loading the XP pro disk I have that will be XP and W/98.

Thanks a lot for your comments guys.
As far as I'm concerned, this is one of two Windows computers I own, it has XP, it has 4GB of RAM, it is the computer I mainly use for important things.

I want the new SATA disk drive to be a seperate drive to C:
C: is partitioned into C and D drives, E is the CD ROM Drive
F is the USB stick I sometimes use to add stuff from "outside", it also shows up as G drive, after I have plugged it into my laptop, so that letter is not available.

I don't want striping or anything like that, because if one drive fails, it will take the whole array out, they must be independent of one another.

Raid is going to make one bad drive transparent. You can rebuild the bad drive from the stripes on the good ones. That is the reason for doing it. We used Raid 5 where you have 4 drives to handle about 3 drives worth of data.
If you are not raiding them, when you add the second drive one will be C:, the other D: then extended partitions will start with E: on the C: drive and whatever address is next on the D drive when you finish all the partitions on C:.
It is a good idea to label each drive with the address they are when things are normal. Then if something is wrong it becomes apparent right away. You can really get confused otherwise.
My CDROM is I: on this machine. (2 drives with multiple partitions and a ram drive). When I plug in a USB card reader it can really get confusing. I get up to drive M:

RAID a cheap feature to add, so most modern motherboards have that capability, but don't feel like you need to use it.

SATA is just like IDE, only the cable is easier to route Don't do anything different than you'd do with IDE. Once the drive is installed, go into BIOS and enable it. One problem you *may* run into is that the legacy IDE port is sometimes either/or with one of the SATA pairs, in that you have to disable the IDE to use the opposite SATA ports (or vice versa). If this is the case, you can either try another SATA port or get a converter to plug your IDE drive into a SATA port for about $15; I had to do this with my last motherboard.

SATA is faster than IDE, but the drives themselves aren't any faster, so you'd probably never notice the speed difference.

With SATA, you also don't have to worry about jumper settings or slave/master configurations.

Or manually setting the drive cylinder and other information in BIOS before it would recognize the drive. Oh man was that ever a pain in the ass! Not too much of that with modern motherboards, though. All nice and easy now

Stripping can be good sometimes....

We would have never guessed. Working your way through college?

you don't need to worry about the drive letter the OS automatically handles that

Steve,
It isn't actually speed I'm after with this upgrade, I need more space, I'm down to about 12% in C drive and 8% in D drive.
I'm going to try installing these devices this weekend and see how it goes.

And don't worry, I'll still have my laptop to come in here and pay you fellas out if it all goes wrong.

Unless you have a reason or specific desire to keep it all in one box, you might consider external drives. USB-only ones are the most popular. But many stores (at least here in the US) have one or more triple-interface (USB, Firewire, eSATA) models. I have 9 of these in my setup.

No,
Thanks for the suggestion, mate, but I'd sooner keep everything in the one box, at least I know where it all is then.

Woohoo!!
I now have a SATA DVD writer and a new 500GB of space to play around with.

I did try the install yesterday, but for I had a couple of settings in BIOS mucked up (can you say crash and burn?).

Got up early this morning and under the influence of hideous amounts of caffeine, managed to get things working properly.

RAID is not something I really need at this point in time, I've pretty much got everything backed up to the hilt, so if either the IDE or this new drive fails, I'm not going to run home crying to Mummy.

Thanks a heap for all of you guys that gave very good advice, it's most appreciated.

Mike.

RAID is only useful if you need to ride through a hard drive outage with no downtime. That's redundancy. Another form of redundancy I often practice is a whole mirrored machine ready to take over. Or it can even be live all the time for certain protocols like DNS and NTP servers.

We can live through the inconvenience of a few hours or even days downtime if a drive or machine fails. But the backups (plural emphasis) are important.

RAID was really designed for AS400 type machines where the loss of one drive meant the loss of the whole storage array (basically everything on every drive you have). It was then picked up for servers where even a backup every night doesn't prevent losing a day's work. Now I suppose all server racks are RAID. We used RAID 5 where you have up to 11 drives in an array and you can lose any one without any loss of data. It is hot swap and automatic resync so the system never burps. You just get a message on the console telling you to replace a drive.

RAID, however, will NOT protect you from errant programs destroying the data stored on the array. Drop a database or format a partition, and it's done across the array. If a drive dies right after that, replace the drive and you still have a dropped database or a formatted partition. Backups and utterly crucial and RAID is never a substitute for backups.