Im an SATA nub!

Nieldo · 18 Mar 2006 at 16:00

So a while back I baught a new mobo and noticed it had some SATA sockets.

Just baught myself a Western Digital 10000RPM 36.7GB hard drive but I have no idea how to set up SATA drives.

I got a floppy disk with the mobo which says RAID SATA drivers so I just checked the manual but it has nothing on it.

Could someone give me a rundown of how to set up an SATA drive from scratch?

(I plan to install a fresh copy of windows on it when it arrives.)

Nieldo · 18 Mar 2006 at 18:28

wow that simple? thanks, I thought it was a bit harder.

Nieldo · 19 Mar 2006 at 00:33

oh sorry

Athlon 64 3500+
Kingston HyperX PC3200 400Mhz 768MB (512+256)
Sapphire X800GTO2
MSI K8N Neo4 Mobo
Some old 40gb hard drive IDE (ATM)
Western Digital 36.7GB 10,000RPM (On the way)

DVD Reader
CD Reader and writer

.....

Powersupplie and two case fans

Additional info on the mobo:

On-Board SATA

• NV RAID supports 4 SATA ports.
- Transfer rate is up to 150MB/s.

NV RAID (Software)
• Supports up to 4 SATA and 4 ATA133 Hard drives
- RAID 0 or 1, 0+1, JBOD is supported
- RAID function available for ATA133+SATA H/D drives

Nieldo · 19 Mar 2006 at 11:26

smids said:
- Remove ALL other drives - there is a reason for this.
- Place the SATA drive in the computer and attach the SATA cable and power cable.
- Use ONLY ONE power source either SATA or Molex, NOT both.
- Make sure the SATA cable is plugged into one of the nForce4 ports (to ensure driverless installation - nF4 can default all SATA ports to IDE mode until the nV IDE SW drivers are installed from the nF4 chipset package).
- Once windows is installed, connect up all other drives, ensuring BIOS boots from the Raptor first so you'll need to set boot priority, especially if you have IDE drives as BIOS will always see IDE drives first, then SATA drives.

Okay so:

Remove IDE Drive
Plug in SATA Drive
Plug in the molex cable
Install windows as normal
Plug in IDE drive and on boot up select the SATA drive as the one to boot from in BIOS
Time how long it takes windows to boot (Im upgrading from a 5400RPM)
Install Oblivion and die of starvation.

Sorted, thanks!