Newbie ques

smithy1988 · 18 Jul 2007 at 22:54

Hi all just wanted to ask a few things about the sata drives and raid.
Am i right in thinking that sata is the latest development in hard drives and uses a small cable, this allows faster speeds to be obtained?. This technology is replacing the older IDe drives and ribbon cables?
What is raid what is its function etc etc
Thanks

fobose · 18 Jul 2007 at 23:11

Yeah sata uses smaller cables and allows transfer rates up to 300Mb/s -although no single drive can sustain an average of even 100Mb/s at the moment..

This website explains the different RAID levels;

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

Have a flick through the level to see what each is used for. Common ones are RAID 0, 1 and 5.

smithy1988 · 18 Jul 2007 at 23:18

Cheers- its stil a bit way over my head but i do understand some of the things its highlighted. I doubt id really ever need more than 1 hard drive. So if thats the case and i bought a sata one does it just connect to a sata 1 slot on the mainboard and then u forget about raid?

fobose · 18 Jul 2007 at 23:22

Yup, if you buy a SATA hard drive, aslong as your motherboard has SATA connectors you can plug a SATA hard drive in to it. If windows does not detect your hard drive you might have to install drivers for the SATA controller.

Dont forget if your adding the hard drive to a PC with windows on already, just go in to control panel -> administrative tools -> disk management and right click on the drive to set it up, which will then make it display in "My Computer". - This is presuming you dont need drivers for your SATA controller.

smithy1988 · 18 Jul 2007 at 23:28

K cool im not thinking about buying a new one at the moment- but just for a future upgrade as i know that curently my hard drive is ide. Id probz upgrade DIY so just useful to know.
Thanks