Serial ATA & IDE

[plotloss]

Chaps,

Mate of mine has a mobo with 2 DVDRW's and 2 IDE HDD's

He now wants to fit another HDD drive.

The mobo I fitted in has 2 onboard IDE channels which are obviously both full and a number (2 I think) of Serial ATA connections.

Can I use the ATA connection for the third HDD (obviously buying a Serial ATA HDD) or do I have to resort to a PCI IDE Controller card?

Are there any advantages to Serial ATA over IDE or the other way around?

[warmfuzzies]

It depends really,
My Abit NF7 ver2 has 2 serial ata ports for raid, I generally use one of these for my primary drive.
However some motherborads have the raid channel setup just for raid only and single drives don't seem to work.
You could always try it with the boot drive if you have the ATA cables etc....most setups these days throw the cables in, unless it was shop built of course.

[plotloss]

This is the issue, I cant remember what the name of the board is.

Its got the standard two IDE channels, a couple for IDE RAID and some Serial ATA.

I've not dealt with these things before.

Will it be jumper controlled? i.e. you can use either ATA or IDE but not both?

[ErnestM]

Matt...

My Asus is this way:

2 IDE Channels
2 SATA Channels (Intel Southbridge - may or may not be used for RAID - currently not)
Single Channel (2 drive) Promise RAID controller

Everything is controlled from BIOS. Not only do you need to set things up as far as Boot options but you also have to identify which drives are #1, #2, #3, #4 etc...

Also if RAID is contemplated EITHER SATA RAID or Promise IDE RAID can be used - not both...

You can mix IDE with SATA, no problem. (SATA are one drive per connection btw)

Best thing about SATA - near high end SCSI speed/performance without the cost. BTW adaptec also do high end SATA RAID controllers these days as well. Including hot swappable drive... Good Stuff!

ErnestM

[warmfuzzies]

As Ernst has said, the BIOS is where the serial ATA or Raid will be enabled. just turn the option on and see what happens, I coose to have my ATA drive on the raid channel as a single drive because then each drive has it's own channel to be called from, if you burn on the fly as I tend to when copying/cloning etc its a quicker job.

kevin

[plotloss]

Right, thanks chaps.

I will advise the purchase of the Serial ATA version and then go from there.