SATA question

[Steven O.]

I'm planning to build a new PC, not sure yet if I'll keep my current
IDE drives or get the new SATA drives. One thing I notice for all the
vendor-built PCs that use SATA drives -- if they have two drives, they
use them for disk mirroring.

What I do is use on drive as a c: drive for the OS and programs, and
the second physical drive for my data files.

Q: With IDE, that's never been a problem, using two physical drives
with separate drive letters. With the SATA drives and connectors, can
I still do the same? Or is there something that *forces* you to use
them disk mirroring, so they cannot have separate drive letters?

Steve O.



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[Clint]

Not ALL vendor built PC's use multiple drives for mirroring. For example,
with Dell, you typically have the option of RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1
(mirroring), or JBOD (just a bunch of discs). You may have to request a
particular configuration when you order it, or re-do it the way you want if
you don't request it up front.

Anyway, to answer your question, there should be nothing that forces you to
use disk mirroring or striping.

Clint

 

[paulmd]

I'm planning to build a new PC, not sure yet if I'll keep my current
IDE drives or get the new SATA drives. One thing I notice for all the
vendor-built PCs that use SATA drives -- if they have two drives, they
use them for disk mirroring.

What I do is use on drive as a c: drive for the OS and programs, and
the second physical drive for my data files.

Q: With IDE, that's never been a problem, using two physical drives
with separate drive letters. With the SATA drives and connectors, can
I still do the same? Or is there something that *forces* you to use
them disk mirroring, so they cannot have separate drive letters?

No. You can have multiple independant SATA drives. It's just that raid
has gotten cheap enough to be on the consumer market, that most new
boards have some raid capibility.

 

[Boba & Ilinka]

If you have 2 drives in raid 1 or 0, you could stil partishen tham, so you
could get c and d drives for program and data.

 

[Ken Maltby]

I'm planning to build a new PC, not sure yet if I'll keep my current
IDE drives or get the new SATA drives. One thing I notice for all the
vendor-built PCs that use SATA drives -- if they have two drives, they
use them for disk mirroring.

What I do is use on drive as a c: drive for the OS and programs, and
the second physical drive for my data files.

Q: With IDE, that's never been a problem, using two physical drives
with separate drive letters. With the SATA drives and connectors, can
I still do the same? Or is there something that *forces* you to use
them disk mirroring, so they cannot have separate drive letters?

Steve O.

You need not have a RAID array at all. One of the great things
about SATA is that its been implemented with each drive being
a single "master". There are no conflicts possible between drives.

I've had three WD SATA Raptor 10,000rpm drives one as the C:
"System" drive, one as a D: "Capture" drive and an F: "XP64Bit"
drive for my dual boot.

Luck;
Ken


Luck;
Ken

 

[DaveW]

No, you do not have to use the SATA drives in disk mirroring mode. You can
use them the way you are used to using them.