Ok so stupid me returns. My new m/b has SATA and I was just wondering what difference would I see from having 2 x 250gb SATA instead of the IDE equivelent. I have also been trawilng through google to find a good setup guide, many tell me I need windows installed on a current IDE to install SATA. So my questions. 1. How much difference between SATA and IDE? 2. How do I setup SATA? 3. Do I need a RAID configuration? 4. Does anyone know any good guides or walkthroughs to do this? Thanks in advance for all replies. P.S Jam, I know I am stupid, but I cannot help it. I tried google! Living on a steady diet of....soda pop and ritalin

1. The biggest difference is the type of cable required for SATA. It's a lot smaller than an IDE. SATA have a little faster transfer rate (between the drive and the FSB) than IDE (SATA II will be even faster). 2. If you are going to RAID them, create the RAID and synchronize it before trying to install the OS. Without RAID, you simply begin the install process and have the SATA drivers handy (on floppy) and when you see "Press F6 for....." hit F6 and get ready to copy the SATA drivers from floppy. Windows needs these drivers present to be able to access the disk so ensure you have them handy before you begin the install. 3. Unless this is a server, no, you don't need to RAID your disks. There are a lot of people who think they know what they're talking about and will advise you to do a RAID 0 for faster access and improved performance but simply put, RAID 0 has no redundancy. This means, if one disk in the array fails, all your data is lost. A RAID 1 offers redundancy as will a RAID 5, but a RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 HDD's. Having said all that, a RAID at home isn't worth the trouble. Just do good, regular backups. I'm and IT professional and work with about 30 people all told in our IT department who are also professionals. Not a one of them (myself included) RAID's at home. 4. Nope sorry, I don't know of any. I've just built/setup/installed enough servers over the years that I know how to do it from experience. However, you could try your motherboard and/or HDD manufacturer's web site for a guide. Truthfully, it's not that hard if you have your drivers ready when you begin the install.

1. How much difference between SATA and IDE? All data on your computer is encoded in bytes (byte = 8 bits). Parallel ATA or PATA (you call IDE) send all 8 bits of each byte at the same time. This requires eight data lines. Serial ATA or SATA sends one bit at a time. This requires one data line. Traditionally sending data was faster using parallel. Parallel ATA speeds have increased to the point that is was getting hard for all the bits to arrive at the same time. This could lead to data corruption and required data to be resent which slowed down the speed of sending the data. Worse case was to lose the data. Because of the speed barrier engineers looked at using serial data transfer to send hard drive data. BTW, going from 40 wire to 80 wire PATA cables was a way to reduce the possibility of data corruption on ATA 100/133 drives. The theoretical limit for PATA drives is either 100MB/sec or 133MB/sec depending upon the drive and manufacturer. The theoretical limit for SATA drives is 150MB/sec for SATA-I and 300MB/sec for SATA-II. With a SATA drive you may see a 1 to 5 percent performance increase over a PATA drive. This is because of other components in the system such as the PCI bus are placing bottlenecks in the system. SATA drives should perform better as the bottlenecks are removed. 2. How do I setup SATA? The motherboard or PCI card with the SATA controller should come with a software driver for the controller. If you are using a motherboard SATA there are setup changes in the BIOS for enable/disable SATA and RAID/non-SATA. There may also be a enable/disable jumper on the motherboard. For a system without an operating system in which you want to put the OS on the SATA drive you must hit F6 during the Windows XP install the SATA controller driver. The SATA controller driver must have previously been placed on a floppy disk. A name brand system may have the driver already on the included CD. For a SATA drive being added to a system with Windows on a PATA drive then you can install the SATA controller driver asked instructed from the running system. 3. Do I need a RAID configuration? Home users usually only two types of RAID, RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 divides the work of storing data between two drives. For example, two 80 GB drives under RAID 0 act as a single 160 GB drive. Because both drives can be accessed at the same time the fact that only half the data needs to written to each drive the perceived data read/write rate can be up to twice the rate for one drive. The disadvantage is that if even if only one drive is lost then all data is lost on both drives. RAID 1 is when the same data is written to both drives at the same time. The advantage is if one drives is lost then you still have all your data on the second drive. The disadvantage is that for two 80 GB drives you still only have 80 GB of storage. There is also a slight performance hit. Some people have reported a noticeable gain in speed using RAID 0. Some have not. In any case if you try it make sure you keep your data backed up. Some people opt to use two small drives in RAID 0 and one large drive in a non-RAID configuration. The main thing on the RAID drives is the OS and temporary files. The user’s data is on the large non-RAID drive. 4. Does anyone know any good guides or walkthroughs to do this? There is a lot of general information on SATA and RAID if you Google for it. The details of how to set up your individual motherboard SATA or RAID lies in the documentation provided. Once you get the basics down then try it. If you don’t like it you can always start over and not use the RAID at all.

Thanks for both the replies, they are excellent, with doing my microsoft certification you would think I could do this without a problem! My SATA is built into the Biostar m/b I have, I checked the cd it came with and nothing. The bios does have settings though. I have emailed biostar to see if they have any newbie guides or advice for setting up SATA for the first time. What attracts me the most is the thin cables and with them I maybe get a drop in temp in my pc. *crosses fingers* Anyway, thanks for the help again, this site kicks ass! Living on a steady diet of....soda pop and ritalin