Losing My SATA Cherry

oHUTCHYo · 7 Nov 2006 at 22:04

Im planning on buying a 10,000RPM SATA HD, just 2 questions if you will gents

1) To install SATA drivers, do you normally get a floppy disk with the hard drive? If not, where can I find the ones I need to use? Are they always generic drivers? Do you encounter many problems installing SATA instead of IDE?

2) If I have a 10,000RPM primary drive for Windows, games, music etc, and buy a standard secondary 7000RPM drive as a backup, will the 10,000RPM primary suffer a performance hit?

P.S. I dont plan to run a RAID setup.

Thanks a lot

pstation3 · 7 Nov 2006 at 22:24

when i setup my sata was just a case of changing a setting in bios didnt need any drivers .As for 2nd question sata drives have there own data cables not shared like ide so no speed loss on your 10000

dheyworth1981 · 9 Nov 2006 at 15:28

If you are trying to boot from it, then you will need a driver for the SATA controller (Mobo or seperate card)...no driver needed for the hard disk istself
If you are just using it as an extra drive, windows should find it easily as long as your SATA drivers are installed

2) No, only when copying data to the 7000RPM drive

rpstewart · 9 Nov 2006 at 15:51

dheyworth1981 said:
If you are trying to boot from it, then you will need a driver for the SATA controller

Not necessarily, most SATA controllers can be set in an IDE emulation / non RAID mode which doesn't need a driver. Any form of RAID however and a driver floppy is essential.

spb251272 · 10 Nov 2006 at 12:34

Can't you load RAID drivers from flash drives as well as floppies?

33L · 10 Nov 2006 at 13:04

not on a new install with xp (vista you can)

fumbles · 10 Nov 2006 at 15:34

"P.S. I dont plan to run a RAID setup."
Considering that, your drives will work fine. Ive got a WD Raptor 10krpm, a Maxtor 250gb 7.2krpm, and a WD 300gb 7.2krpm and they all work fine.

WinXP SP2 already has SATA drivers loaded into it. As does Linux if you are taking that path.

Sata hdd are better, for starters the cables are smaller. THey are also hot swapable, although I wouldnt test that. Plus there are no jumpers to worry about.

nigel1210 · 12 Nov 2006 at 13:51

any idea if there would be much of a performance loss if i drop the ram to pc5300?

Bane · 12 Nov 2006 at 16:40

rpstewart said:
Not necessarily, most SATA controllers can be set in an IDE emulation / non RAID mode which doesn't need a driver. Any form of RAID however and a driver floppy is essential.

Is there a performance drop associated with using IDE emulation mode? Just I'll be moving to S-ATA in a week, so no experience of it yet.

rpstewart · 12 Nov 2006 at 19:06

Bane said:
Is there a performance drop associated with using IDE emulation mode? Just I'll be moving to S-ATA in a week, so no experience of it yet.

None whatsoever, I really should stop calling it that becuase it's not an emulation mode at all, just a single drive that appears to the OS in the same way as a traditional IDE drive would.