I'm trying to get this straight. If I install a sata drive, I wont even
recognize the sata hard drive, if I boot to Dos using a bootable floppy.
Correct?
If thats true, I sure dont like that..... It's not something I do
often, but it's always been an option if my system wont boot up. Maybe
I'm just locked in the old ways, which is how one would fix Win98 or
earlier, but this has always been an available option, and is the reason
I never use HTFS formatting, and always use FAT32.
You kind of lost me on the "Your choices there are IDE/RAID/AHCI."
Yea, I know what IDE is, but what are those others?
The more I know about this, the less I like having to use a SATA drive.
At the same time I dont want to lose the optical drives. It's too bad
they cant put TWO IDE connectors on there MBs, like they used to do.
I'm not sure if the future of computers is going to be SATA drives, or
it's just a cost saving matter to not have two NEEDED IDE connectors.
In this thread, it was mentioned that there are cards that can be
plugged into a slot, to add more IDE connectors. I assume they go into
a regular PCI slot. I'm beginning to think that may be the better
solution, put the HDs on that card, adn leave the optical drives on the
original MB connector (or vice versa).
That leaves me wondering what to search for on Ebay, or a computer store
website. These cards must have a "name". What am I looking for?
If they are reasonably priced, I may just buy one, re-sell the Sata
drive I ordered, and buy a larger size IDE drive. I thought SATA was
"the latest and greatest", but it appears they are more of a hassle and
not worth the trouble.
This leaves me with one last quesrtion, are these SATA drievs intended
for the Mac computers, or MainFrame systems, or what?
IDE has been around a long time and sems to work just fine. I can only
guess these SATA drives are just another gimmick to continue the never
ending battle to force people to buy more stuff. It's bad enough MS
does this with their OSs, but then we have these hardware manufacturers
apparently doing the same. I was told ASUS makes top quality
motherboards, but I sort of question that now, if they cant provide TWO
IDE connectors, which are obviously necessary for someone using MS
Windows.
SATA drives offer the advantage of higher transfer rates.
Ribbon cables went as high as 133MB/sec, but in most cases, users
would see 100MB/sec read and 88MB/sec write. That's because there
weren't a lot of cases where all components were ready for 133MB/sec.
SATA does 150MB/sec, 300MB/sec, 600MB/sec. Those are three of
the speeds it does. The platters on the other hand, range from
65MB/sec, 135MB/sec, 180MB/sec (that's how fast the data comes
off, where the heads meet the platter). And when SSD (solid state drives)
are considered, they use every bit of the available bandwidth
of SATA. So SATA and SSD go hand in hand. You can get SSD
drives, operating at 500MB/sec.
It's a natural progression, as many parts of the computer now
use similar, fast, point to point interconnect. The PCI Express bus,
SATA cable, and USB3, all use very high speed serial differential
interconnect. It's great stuff. The signals look nice. If you
looked at the electrical signals on an IDE cable, you'd barf
they look so bad. You'd be asking the question "my data
travels on *THAT*". That's how bad it is. SATA is a very
nice interconnect and well behaved. It's rather amazing
that IDE works at all.
*******
I see no reason to panic in your case. As far as I know,
there isn't a strong usage case for two optical drives.
You can do reading and burning with the burner drive, and
remove the other one. Then, just jumper the IDE hard drive with
a jumper setting, that complements the existing (remaining) optical drive.
The optical drive and hard drive can coexist on the same IDE
cable, without "slowing one another down". At least, on
modern computers.
*******
IDE Native (registers in I/O space, INT14 and INT15 used for interrupts)
IDE Enhanced (registers in PCI space, INTA# for interrupts)
Both of those, work the same at the disk drive end. The difference
there, is older versus newer OSes. If you want to install Win98,
you use IDE Native, because that's all that Windows 98 knows about.
An IDE ribbon cable, is the IDE you know and love. When a SATA
device in the BIOS has an "IDE" entry for it, it means the
hardware emulates an IDE device, converting between any nuances
of IDE and SATA. The SATA drive may even be given a fake name
of "Master" or "Slave", but SATA drives have no jumpers for such,
so those are just names now.
So SATAs can be converted to Fake IDE, by your motherboard. The
OS thinks it is installing on an IDE drive. This is great, if
the OS only has IDE drivers.
AHCI is a newer standard for SATA. It adds some things to
basic drive operation. Hot Plug, is the ability to connect
a hard drive to the computer, while it is running. Almost
as if the SATA cable was a USB cable. That is useful for things
like SATA docks - a device with a slot where a SATA hard
drive can plug in.
AHCI also supports native command queuing. It allows the motherboard
to issue command 1,2,3. And for the disk to complete the commands
in order 1,3,2. The disk drive gives a number, for each command it
completes, so the motherboard end knows how much work it has done.
The reason the disk wants to execute the commands out of order,
is so the hard drive head travels the least distance.
RAID is for multiple drives. It seems to share some of the AHCI
code, but for soft RAID, the driver has to know how to stitch
the data back together, so the OS can use it. If the data
is interleaved on the drives, the RAID driver de-interleaves it.
The OS thinks it is reading from a "very large logical disk".
The RAID driver hides the details of working with multiple
disks and spreading the data over them.
*******
So when do you use the various modes ?
1) IDE is for a single drive, which is just going to
stay put inside the computer. And the user has such a
low work load for the drive, that NCQ is not really needed.
If you're emailing and web surfing, this is good enough.
IDE Native or Compatible, are going to work with more OSes,
without driver floppies, than anything else. For example,
I don't use AHCI in the house here at all. And this was
a decision on my part, and not an accident.
2) AHCI is suited to computers where you want to plug in
drives on the fly. I'm not even sure that AHCI makes
sense for NCQ on SSD drives. Since an SSD drive completes
commands so fast, it isn't required. AHCI might be good
for a server computer, where the disk drives are pummeled
24/7 with requests, and the command queue can grow quite large.
3) RAID is for when you have multiple disks. And have a
clue what weaknesses RAID has. No need to discuss that
in your case, if only a drive or two will be in use.
RAID can give higher speed (RAID0), or reliability
(parity drive for redundancy in a RAID5 three or four drive
array). But it's generally not a good fit for home users,
because a home user will freak out when a RAID dies on them
I've had discussions with the people who freak out on
a busted RAID. Loads of fun. You see, nobody tests
these things, before they put a ton of movies on them
I feel sorry for the users who put so much work into it.
*******
If installing WinXP, I would recommend a WinXP SP2 or SP3 installer
disc. You can start with any version, and end up with one of those,
using Autostreamer or Nlite (NLite being the more recent program).
If you start with WinXP Gold (no SP) or WinXP SP1A, I don't know
whether the IDE Enhanced driver is present.
If you have a working floppy drive, and use the MAKEDISK, you
can create a floppy driver diskette, press F6 when prompted by
the WinXP installer CD, and have it pick up the driver from that.
What I can't tell you, is whether there will be any issues with
using an older version of WinXP, like WinXP Gold.
Downloading the network version of SP2 or SP3, gives you materials
to use with NLite. And then you can make a new CD.
I had to do that, back when I was using Win2K. I bought a
Win2K SP2 disc. It would not handle hard drives larger than
137GB. I could use a 120GB IDE drive OK. But a 160GB drive
would have lost capacity. So, I downloaded SP4 and used
AutoStreamer, to make a Win2K SP4 disc. I could then reinstall
Win2K SP4 on larger IDE drives. Or, plug in a SATA drive larger
than the limit, and not have to worry about something getting
corrupted. An incentive for slipstreaming up to the latest
installer disk, is not having to worry about drivers any more
(at least, for IDE). And also, not having to worry about
capacity limits (up to the 2TB limitation of MBR partitioning).
I have one 3TB drive here, and I have to use a special driver
in WinXP, to make it look like a 2TB drive plus a 1TB drive.
The driver makes a "fake" hard drive. And no, you don't
want to do that, as it's all I can do to keep it running
Stick with drives under 2TB when purchasing, and there
will be less hair loss while using them.
HTH,
Paul
