Question on adding another HDD

[mjolnir1134]

Howdy, I just have a question about adding hard drives in the comp:

Currently, the Hard Drive I'm booting off of is a Seagate 80GB (1mb cache) Windows XP formatted hard drive that originally came with my eMachines T2958. I need more space (and perhaps better space to load my games off of).

I found out my motherboard, the Gigabyte GA-8I848P, supports Serial ATA, which is SATA.

I am planning on probably buying and hooking up this SATA hard drive (WD caviar SE 160GB) and let it run alongside my old Seagate 80GB ATA hdd.

Will this be a problem? Having an ATA Hard Drive coexist with a SATA HDD? Will this cause conflicts with booting my XP system? I never had a second hard drive in my system before, and I'd like to know what you would have to do to just "add" more HDD space to the computer...

[2 Left Feet]

From what I hear often when adding a SATA drive to a case is that the ide drive will have to remain the main drive for Windows to run on. Some are able to boot from a SATA drive if they get their bios settings correct for that.

If the Windows disk management tool can detect the drive after you add the raid drivers you can use that to format the addon drive for increaing storage of your files. The ide controller will override the SATA anyway so you wouldn't see a new drive cause problems.

Are you are still unsure? You could simply go with a second ide drive to add space and use the same disk management tool in the control panel under administrative tools to format it.

[mjolnir1134]

I forgot to say I want the SATA to be a "slave" drive, and my IDE drive I'm booting off of is obviously my "Master" drive.

I dunno... I just hear that SATA is faster than those IDE drives, because I have a gaming comp and I want my games to load off of a fast Hard drive, which is the SATA drive.

So all I need to do to set up my SATA drive is to have windows xp do its thing to format it and such without a fuss?

[2 Left Feet]

The rpm rates are the same between the newer line of ide drives at 7,200rpm along with the SATA drives themselves except a Raptor drive. The transfer rate with the SATA cable itself is where the speed increase is seen.

Unlike a second ide drive a SATA isn't slaved to the master or host ide drive. For a single drive there you would plug that into the SATA master. The ide controller will still master itself over the SATA unless you reassign the boot device order in the system bios.

With a second ide drive you would slave that to the host drive by connecting it to the middle connector on the primary cable or simply run it on the secondary as master or slave to the cd or dvd drive there. Once the needed drivers are in on your ide host drive and you have enabled the SATA controler in the system bios you shouldn't see a problem formatting and using the SATA drive.