sata drives

THC_SsSsSnake

THC_SsSsSnake

THC_SsSsSnake

Associate
Joined
7 Jan 2003
Posts
1,466
Location
Leicester
i have an ide ibm hard drive,am thinking of getting a Sata when I buy my new board,but ive heard that when you are installing windows xp it asks for a floppy disk with some drivers or other on.
is this so and do you get the disk with the drive,seems a pain as id more or less ditched the floppy drive? is it worth the hassle or just as well stick to ide?
thankyou
 
All motherboard manufacturers with SATA controllers that require the F6 driver input in XP setup will provide a floppy disk. It's not much of a hassle really and I do indeed like the benefits of SATA over IDE - smaller cables, NCQ (though will not benefit everyone), tiny performance increase as well as good bandwidth for RAID solutions.

I think it's definitely worth it and I no longer use IDE HDU's. A good thing if you have an nForce4 controller is that the SATA ports default to a pseudo IDE mode so the drivers are not required for installation.
 
thanks Smids ,forgive my begginners questions but is the asus premium board have a n nforce controller and if so are you saying I wouldnt need a floppy and I wouldnt be raiding so I wouldnt get asked for a disk then?
If I decide to stay IDE can you reccomend the best drive that is not too big say 40-80 gig,does the cache size make a difference,I only have a 30 gig IBM at the moment and it only gets about half full:)
thanks
 
Last edited:
If it's an A64 K8 board with a PCI-Express graphics card, then yes it is nF4 in which case no drivers would be needed (for any non-RAID array). I'd certainly recommend an 80GB over a 40GB for the cost per gigabyte. Either the Seagate 7200.9 80GB SATA or IDE, or the Hitachi T7K80 SATA or 80GB IDE. Cache I would say get an 8MB one - I used to have a 160GB 2MB cache drive and when I switched to an 8MB cache, the difference was phenomenal in games but for normal operation you wouldn't notice it too much.
 
smids said:
I think it's definitely worth it and I no longer use IDE HDU's. A good thing if you have an nForce4 controller is that the SATA ports default to a pseudo IDE mode so the drivers are not required for installation.
Click to expand...

So once its installed do you then change it to sata in the bios(pseudo ide mode ie)?
thanks
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom