Adding SATA drives to a K8Ne-Dlx

[aberger]

I recently had a hard drive scare. My K8NE-DLX system has been
amazingly stable since I built it, but all of a sudden the NTFS fie
system went haywire on my data drive, a 200 GB Maxtor PATA partitioned
as drive D: and E:, each 100 GB. Actually, I think it was a minor
problem until I futzed around with it and turned it into a major
problem by running defrag. Anyway, it got me thinking about what to do
if this Maxtor drive really does go belly-up. Fry's has had some good
prices lately on SATA drives.

Anyway, this mother board has 2 SATA connectors for the RAID controller
and two more that are just there on the motherboard. I assume that the
second pair, the two non-raid SATA connectors would be the same as the
primary and secondary PATA connectors on the board. So, I just wanted
to verify that if I bought a SATA drive I could just plug it in without
worrying about loading the latest SIL drivers.

Arnie

 

[Tom Dauphin]

You may wish to check your motherboard manual on this. I've got a P4C800
with similar connections - 2 SATA Promise Raid connectors and 2 SATA regular
connectors. I have two WD HDs on the promise in Raid 0 and just added a new
SATA Maxtor to one of the other SATA connectors. It worked fine as long as
you have your settings correct in the BIOS (Believe it's enhanced rather
than compatible setting but check your manual). It also has something to do
with your operating system, as legacy systems like Win 9.x can't handle more
than 4 devices - ie 2 Prim and 2 Sec... XP has no problem with this though -
you can have a total of 6 devices... I've got 2 optical, a zip, and a hard
drive on the PATA connectors (4 devices). Also got the new SATA HD connected
and everything works fine in XP with all 5 devices. Doing a ghost image from
DOS boot is another matter and so the Bios settings have to be set back to
compatible to see the correct HDs - not a biggie if you never ghost from
DOS. In fact - not that big of a deal doing the ghost - just have to
remember to reset the Bios... But check your manual to be sure OK?

 

[you@mama]

I just did this on a A7N8X-E Deluxe board.

I had 2 PATA and 2 CD/DVDs on the IDE ports and wanted to add another
HD just for storage. So first I turned everything off and enabled the
SATA ports on the motherboard using the jumper. Then I restarted and
booted into Win2k and loaded the SiI SATA driver when it said it
"found new hardware". Then I shut everything off again and installed
a new SATA drive to the first port. Then I booted back into Win2k and
went to the disk manger to initialize and format the drive.

Now that the SiI SATA controller is turned on, there is a "second
BIOS" screen during boot up. If I go into that BIOS there are options
for managing RAID sets. Since I don't have an SATA RAID set I just
ignore the settings there and all is well. It's probably the same way
on your system. Also, make sure the "first" BIOS (main BIOS) is still
set to boot from your PATA drive, probably "HDD-0". For all the
horror stories on these newsgroups it's actually a very pain free
thing to do. I think people just don't follow directions well.

 

[Nickeldome]

I recently had a hard drive scare. My K8NE-DLX system has been
amazingly stable since I built it, but all of a sudden the NTFS fie
system went haywire on my data drive, a 200 GB Maxtor PATA partitioned
as drive D: and E:, each 100 GB. Actually, I think it was a minor
problem until I futzed around with it and turned it into a major
problem by running defrag. Anyway, it got me thinking about what to do
if this Maxtor drive really does go belly-up. Fry's has had some good
prices lately on SATA drives.

Anyway, this mother board has 2 SATA connectors for the RAID controller
and two more that are just there on the motherboard. I assume that the
second pair, the two non-raid SATA connectors would be the same as the
primary and secondary PATA connectors on the board. So, I just wanted
to verify that if I bought a SATA drive I could just plug it in without
worrying about loading the latest SIL drivers.

Arnie

You have the Silicon3114 raid (4 connectors on the bottom) and the native
Nvidia also raid (2 connectors on top). You can plug in any sata-drive
without a problem. Try to use the Nvidia as much as possible.
It's native, faster and does put less stress on the processor.
For details you will have to consult the manual.

Nickeldome