New Hard Drive time

Gamefreak501 · 2 May 2006 at 11:21

A while ago, I posted a thread about Hard Drives.

Anyway, it's now time for me to get a new Hard Drive - my 74.5gb WD Hard Drive, although still quick enough for my needs has 10gb left in it, I don't know how long that might last but I plan to buy one or two games shortly.

I am thinking of getting a 16mb Cache 200GB SATA II Hard Drive and getting an external USB enclosure for my WD drive to backup my photos and so on. Perhaps getting a firewire controller and using that instead of the USB 2.0 interface.

Heres where the questions start rolling in - Can a SATA II Drive be plugged into a standard SATA motherboard controller? I am thinking it can but I might lose some performance.

I want the SATA II drive to become my main hard drive - the one I boot from install games on and so on. I remember a while back when I had major problems booting from an SATA drive, which I replaced for that standard IDE WD drive.

A friend tells me that provided I use my Windows XP Pro disk, which has SP2 built in, I can press F6 during setup in order to load the right drivers for my SATA drive.

I think that's all for now! Cheers in advance!

Steve-O 2006 · 2 May 2006 at 11:57

I got a SATA2 Western Digital Caviar 250GB 16mb Cache, cost something like £65 when I was building my new system up.

I just connected it up and installed Normal Windows XP (NO Updates) on it like normal and it worked fine but only showed up as 127GB as XP doesnt recognise drives over 127GB. To fix this I installed SP2 and used Maxtors Big Drive Enabler and then Partition Magic to give me the rest of the drive.

Oh yea, and the SATA2 drives have jumpers to set them to SATA. Was reading about SATA2 and their is suposed to be not much difference unless you have a Raid setup thing...

Wish I didnt set my Drive to SATA now as I just relised I was went the wrong motherboard

... I was sent the next motherboard up which supports SATA2

Gamefreak501 · 2 May 2006 at 12:18

Cheers for the help there!

Funnily enough, that drive you mentioned is exactly the kind of hard drive I was looking to get.

I am waiting for my local dealers to get it in, but I may end up buying from OcUK as they seem to be the only place that have 16mb cache SATA drives in stock!

Glad to know you didn't have major problems with windows setup though. Shame about the motherboard though!

Cheers again

Steve-O 2006 · 2 May 2006 at 13:47

Its not realy a shame as the Motherboard I received costs quite a bit more than the one I paid for

Plus its only a 2 min job opening the case and switching the jumper around but I just cant be arsed

hehe

But all in all, I just installed it like a Normal IDE hard drive and installed windows on it like normal and it works great

Gamefreak501 · 2 May 2006 at 14:29

Steve-O 2006 said:
Its not realy a shame as the Motherboard I received costs quite a bit more than the one I paid for Plus its only a 2 min job opening the case and switching the jumper around but I just cant be arsed hehe

But all in all, I just installed it like a Normal IDE hard drive and installed windows on it like normal and it works great

Haha,

Cool, looks like I should not have any problems then!