Quick SATA question...

[Mini-Me]

Hi there everyone.
:)

Q: Can you put a SATA2 drive on a SATA-150 port?

Sounds like a silly question, but this will be my first SATA drive, and I want to be sure...

I am assuming that it is essentially the same as putting an ATA133 drive on an IDE controller that only supports ATA66 - the drive is quite happy, but you won't get full speed data transfers...

Yes?
No?

[jlreich]

Yes SATA II is backwards compatible just like PATA. :)

[Mini-Me]

Thank you for the confirmation.
:)

Do I need RAID, or can I just install onto the SATA drive without it?
RAID confuses the hell out of me...
:(

With the MSI board, I got an old-fashioned 1.44MB floppy-disk with a label that says it is the RAID driver. I assume this is what I need to use, when during XP install, it asks for a 3rd party RAID driver.

What I would like to do is take the 80GB SATA drive, plug it into SATA1 port on the motherboard, and install/partition the drive as I would any other PATA drive.

Can I do this without having to go through all this RAID setup business?

Thanks!
:)

[jlreich]

RAID confuses the hell out of me...
:(
Hehe, yeah it confuses me a little as I am still somewhat new to it. What's worse is it's a little different on each mobo.

No you don't have to use Raid.

In my system (Chaintech nForce 4 ultra) after playing around in the BIOS I figured out that I had to enable Raid in the BIOS, which allowed me into a list of drives I could enable to use in Raid, I left them all disabled. That let me use the drive to install XP without actually using Raid.

I found that if I didn't enable Raid in BIOS, XP setup did not find the drive.

I would install all the drivers on the floppy using the F6 key during the XP install. That way if you ever decide to use Raid they are there and you won't need to reinstall windows to use Raid. You can just build an array with the existing install.

Hope that helps.

[Mini-Me]

Thanks jreich!
:)

That's a great help actually.
Been reading the MSI setup book, and it tells you how to enable/disable the RAID controller, so I will leave it enabled(if it is not already by default)

Will install as you suggest, and if any problems, I will post back here!
;)

[Paul Komski]

No you don't have to use RaidHe He - well not usually. I had an M7-VIK Biostar board that would only work if the single sata drive in the box was configured as a RAID-0. That Promise controller also had its own IDE connector but would only accept a single IDE master which could only be a RAID-0 on its own or else mixed with one or two SATAs, which didnt seem like a good idea. The same Promise chip on a PCI card would support two IDEs as master and slave: go figure.

Most more modern boards wouldn't even "contemplate" such a "single disk array" but as you said every BIOS is different in this area. The manual can be a real life-saver - even though most of them are not generally very clear on these issues.

[Paul Komski]

I figured out that I had to enable Raid in the BIOS, which allowed me into a list of drives I could enable to use in Raid, I left them all disabled. That let me use the drive to install XP without actually using Raid.
Just to confirm - but did you have to enable RAID per se in the BIOS or was it a matter of first enabling the RAID/SATA controller and then once that was enabled you were in a position to assign rather than enable individual SATAs to the RAID or not as the case might be.

Saphalline posted not long ago how modern BIOS can be "told" that SATAs are de facto IDE drives. Of course that's fine - particularly for booting purposes - but the RAID arrays differ in being on the SCSI interface for boot and recognition purposes. In systems like yours there appears to be the facility to use the SATAs as PATAs (so to speak) unless configured into arrays.

I think its useful to bandy these thoughts around because RAID can be very useful and once up and running - not all that complicated.

[jlreich]

In systems like yours there appears to be the facility to use the SATAs as PATAs (so to speak) unless configured into arrays.
Yes that seems to be the case for my system.

I go into "advanced peripheral setup" and from there enter "Raid setup" which once enabled it un-grays the drive controller list - all controllers being listed as IDE. 0 master, 0 slave, 1 master, 1 slave, and 2-5 all master.

If all of the controllers are left in the default "disabled", then the Raid setup utility does not appear during post.

If I enable any drive for Raid then I have the "press F12 (I think) to enter Raid utility" on the post screen. And whichever drive I enabled for Raid does not show up on the post screen as a detected drive. But of course is listed in the Raid utility.

I went through all the steps to check it out but never actually hit the go button so to speak.

I think its useful to bandy these thoughts around because RAID can be very useful and once up and running - not all that complicated.

I would like to use Raid0 but for now I have a Seagate 250GB IDE and a 250 SATA II. I really want to wait until I have the cash to pick up a matching SATA II. I have XP on the IDE since I had just bought it right before my previous mobo went south and didn't get the SATA II HDD until later. I use the SATA for Suse on a 15GB partition, then have a large NTFS partitions that I run games from, another large one for storage of BiNG images and game images, and last but not least a small 12GB FAT32 partition.

I did do an install of XP just to test it on the now Suse partition and everything went fine. I just didn't see any sense in reinstalling everything to have XP on the SATA when I can just install a few often played games and anything new that would benefit from the extra speed on the SATA. Also, Suse runs much better on it than the 10GB 4200RPM drive it was on before. :D

[Paul Komski]

Thanks jlreich - your board sounds similar to my current Asus A8N-E. The manual was very straightforward and a good mobo manual is a great asset when buying a new system. In fact it's not a bad idea to download the manual prior to ordering a new board.

Setting the "enable" parts and setting the RAID assignments are part one and setting the boot volume (be it an array or a drive) is the other one. On my Asus system the boot order choices vary depending on just what has been enabled/assigned but it is unambiguous about which is which in the boot order and that is very nice.

I suppose if everything simply worked "straight out of the box" that would be nice but not the real world - when it comes to PCs in this stage of their development.

[saphalline]

In fact it's not a bad idea to download the manual prior to ordering a new board.I always do this for any mobo I buy. That way I know what BIOS tweaks need to be done before I get it! :D It also tells me if the BIOS even has the features that I want. If it doesn't, I move on to another mobo...

[jlreich]

Yes me too, I don't even decide to buy a mobo until I have good look though the manual.

[Mini-Me]

Somthing I just noted and found interesting with my 1st SATA drive, is that it only draws about 50% of the current that the PATA drives do.

500mA on the 12v rail is very respectable.

I suppose that the extra juice in a PATA is required to drive the parallel-bus, although technically, if it were purely logic voltages, there should be only microscopic currents involved on the IDE bus anyway, so...

Interesting anyway.

Have started building.
I'll post back with any observations for new SATA users.(if any occur)

[saphalline]

Lower power requirements are mostly due to two things on a hard drive: improved drive electronics (more efficient motor and such) and smaller chips being used (the onboard controller chip and buffer DRAM chip are FAB'ed in a smaller process). I'm sure the bus protocol has something to do with it, too, but it certainly wouldn't account for a 50% reduction in power consumption.