Hello, I am new to the whole SATA / Raid arena and need some help in clarification in the motherboard manual. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-K8U. I have one hard drive that is a Seagate 160 GB SATA. For the moment I only want to run the one hard drive. My question is: can I use this SATA hard drive even though there is only one or because I only want one hard drive I need to run an IDE hard drive through the IDE controller? It is all possible to use the one SATA HD? I understand to use RAID more than one hard drive is needed. It states in the manual the following: Go into the Integrated Peripherals menu and assure that the onchip SATA is enabled. If you want to create raid, set onchip SATA mode to raid (Raid by default)Set onchip SATA mode To IDE if you do not want to create raid. So are they saying I need an IDE hard drive if I set it to IDE in my BIOS or can I use the single SATA on the IDE setting? Thanks for the clarification as I need it.

The direct answer to your question is, yes you can run just one SATA drive. You do not need to run RAID. This line in the manual "Set onchip SATA mode To IDE if you do not want to create raid." is stange. If the option is to set the SATA controllers to IDE mode, I take that to mean just "regular" drive operation on the SATA channels. The wording is confusing. And just as a follow up. SATA and RAID are two completely different things. The main reason that people confuse them to be similar is the fact that when SATA was released the motherboards being released were also suporting RAID on the SATA channels. There are also motherboards that support RAID on the IDE channles - just not very common. Michael J

Hi Michael, thanks for your input and clarification. That was word for word from the manual that is what is confusing me. The motherboard has two ports for SATA 0,1 and two ports for IDE.- Jim

You only need one hard drive - it doesn't matter whether it's IDE or SATA. If you use SATA, the SATA must be enabled in the bios. If you use IDE, the IDE must be enabled in the bios. If you use both types, both must be enabled in the bios. If you use only a SATA drive, in order for Windows to be able to boot on it, you must load the SATA driver early in the initial loading of the files from the Windows CD, when it asks if you need to load a third party driver for ....., press ... (a key), and you provide either a floppy with the SATA driver on it (the floppy often comes with recent mboards), or point it to the location of the SATA driver on your mboard CD. There are probably printed instructions about that that came with the mboard, and/or instructions about that are in the mboard manual document (usually a *.pdf) on the CD. You must have two hard drives to use RAID, so there's no point in enabling it when you have only one hard drive, so in this case you set SATA to IDE mode. Usually if the mboard has SATA, you can only use RAID with the SATA drives.

Hi TaW, thank you for clarifying the whole thing as now it makes more sense. - Jim