building a computer, SATA questions (1 Viewer)

[Christ Reynolds]

i'm building a computer for my brother, but i have never used an SATA drive before. i read about windows xp not recognizing thhose drives from a bootable cd, is this true? if so, is there some way i can install the drivers for the hdd before installing windows? i was thinking of doing a raid 0 setup for him, but the smallest drive i could find is 60GB, and i dont think he needs 120GB of space.

Lian-Li PC-61 black aluminum case
480W Thermaltake Silent PS
ECS 755-A2 mobo
AMD Athlon 64 3000+
2GB PC3200 memory
80 GB SATA drive
Samsung 12x DVD+/-RW
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB 256 bit memory
Klipsch ProMedia 2.1
Viewsonic 19" G90FB monitor

should be a pretty fast system, for $1500.

CJ

 

[Jeff Jacobson]

That is true. You will have to copy the SATA drivers from the Motherboard's driver CD onto a floppy disk. There will be a point in the Windows installation where you press a certain key to setup Raid or SCSI devices (or something like that). You use this option to load the SATA drivers from the floppy.

You can find more specific information on this by searching on Google.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

now that you mention it, during the one million times i have reinstalled windows (before discovering ghost), it tells me to press F6 to install third party drivers. does this only recognize floppy disks? i was hoping to not include a floppy drive with this, but another $6 wont hurt. no working floppy drives to borrow from around here, either. thanks for the reply.

CJ

 

[Christ Reynolds]

i forgot to mention, there is a promotion at newegg where you get a copy of farcry dvd-rom version when you purchase an amd64 cpu and compatible motherboard. i wasnt even aware of it until the game showed up in my shopping cart for $0.00. good deal.

CJ

 

[CRyan]

You must have it on a floppy. I do not recommend using SATA only for an XP machine. Maybe on the next version of Windows. I decided to put the OS on an 80gb IDE drive and also put in a 200gb SATA. SATA offers nothing over IDE unless you are taking advantage of a much faster drive speed.

SATA also made Ghosting a nightmare - a whole other story. Anyway, I did not want a floppy in my case, so I opted for an IDE hard drive for the OS instead.

C. Ryan

 

[Christ Reynolds]

well, i cancelled the order, and will re-order when i get the refund. i wish i asked about that problem before, the ghosting issue put me over the edge. i'll get an ide drive and bypass any hassle related to sata.

CJ

 

[SethH]

SATA also frees up the CPU a bit. Additionally, SATA-II drives offer native command queuing which (at least in theory) could be more of an advantage than a higher drive speed.

 

[Jeremy Anderson]

I have to disagree with CRyan. Since SATA uses its own controller chip, the dependence on the CPU is far less than IDE (though not as good as SCSI). And so long as you do your homework, a clean XP install goes smoothly if you load the third-party drivers.

Also, I had zero problems ghosting with SATA. I ghosted my primary IDE drive with my OS to a 200gb SATA drive (using sysprep before running Ghost so that it would redetect what hard drive channel the OS was on) and then removed my IDE hard drives altogether (leaving only my DVD burner on IDE). Other than the sysprep step, it was like cloning any other drive. The burst speed and sustained throughput are only slightly higher than ATA-133 at its best, but the reduced CPU latency is very nice.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

hmm, well i already cancelled the entire order and re-ordered with an IDE drive (newegg was closed). i'll be building a PC within the next year or so, if i dont go the SCSI route, i'll likely use SATA. i didnt really want to use SATA for my brother after i heard about ghosting and other problems, because i am the one who would have to fix any problem he had. i dont mind figuring out things on my PC, but i didnt want to have to be "on call". reducing re-install problems, if only slightly, could highly benefit me. thanks for the replies.

CJ

 

[CRyan]

Jeremy. What homework did you come up with? I mean how did you install without a floppy? I would love to know as I would like to get rid of the IDE for convenience.

I was assuming he was talking about SATA not II as he did not mention II. I have seen little to no difference with the SATA drive over the IDE at the same RPM and cache. Now, if you have a way of getting around the floppy ordeal, I might change my opinion altogether. Simply everything I read said I had to have a floppy and I could not figure out how to get around it.

Thanks for any input.

 

[Christ Reynolds]

correct.

CJ