Hi everybody, I'm new to SATA technology. Please help me. I went out and bought a SATA drive to increase the current space i have on my Maxtor 20gb ATA drive. I already went into bios and set up raid and it asks me if i want to enter raid setup. I don't know what todo and what to press. I have no clue what raid0 or stripping or mirroring all i want is to have a extra hard drive I can use to put information into or possibly install Windows 7 on it. I also heard you need a floppy disk to install the drivers onto the windows when you install it? Is it necessary is there another way? If not I just want to use it has another drive to put information into. Help.

My advice is to ignore any raid options. It's a complication that you don't need. The drive will not show up in My Computer until you partition/format it. That's done in Disk Management.

It would help to know the make/model of your motherboard. You don't need RAID because you have to have at least two matching drives, plus you apparently don't have a clue how to set it up. And you don't need a floppy to install SATA drivers because they're already built into W7. My advice is to remove the 20GB HDD altogether...it's old, slow & doesn't have enough capacity for W7 to be able to "breathe" comfortably. Install just the 250GB SATA HDD, boot off the WDC software disc, partition/format the drive, then install W7. And assuming it's W7 RC, hopefully you realize it's only good until next year & will then have to be removed & replaced the W7 RTM? There is a workaround to get the RC to RTM upgrade to work, but it involves copying the entire contents of the RTM disc to the HDD, then altering one of the values in the cversion.ini file. Once that's done, you'd have to create a new W7 RTM DVD which includes the altered file, THEN you can proceed with the upgrade. It *should* work, but doing a clean install is almost always better than an in-place upgrade. How To Upgrade Windows 7 RC To RTM

You most likely do not need to use the raid bios to configure your sata. In very rare cases you may need to. See the documentation that comes with your system for detailed help. Almost all boards still have a way to make a sata drive seem like an IDE drive if needed. You can easily try Windows 7 to see if you can view your hard drive without needed drivers. Windows 7 does NOT need floppies but can if you wish. You can now use a CD or usb (maybe network) for additional drivers. Windows 7 may already support your system anyway. Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)