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lifeguard23
Nov 20th, 2007, 01:04 PM
I posted earlier about wanting to increase my overall storage but I’d like to avoid going to an external hard drive. I’m running WinXP with a 40GB drive as my C-Drive and a 200GB as a D-drive (I also have 2 DVD RW drives as an E and F). I want to add a 500GB drive. The plan was to:
1) Ghost a backup of my existing C Drive
2) Install the new 500GB drive and set as C (probably partition it slightly)
3) Ghost my old C image onto the new 500GB drive
4) Cross my fingers and hope it would work without any issues

So I started looking around at drives to buy and came across the Western Digital SE16 500GB SATA2 from ncix.ca (http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=23266&vpn=WD5000AAKS&manufacture=Western%20Digital) which seems like it would be perfect. Where my knowledge breaks down is on the whole SATA thing. I was hoping someone could give me some insight.

I have an ASUS A8N-E motherboard (http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=1&model=455&l1=3&l2=15&l3=171) which appears to support SATA drives.

I’ve just never installed a SATA drive, used one as a C-drive, etc. My question is, can I install the 500GB SATA drive and still Ghost my old C drive onto it? If I plug in the SATA will it then support it as a 3rd hard drive on my system or am I still limited to 2 hard drives? I really don’t need the 40GB drive anymore so it’s irrelevant if I keep it (I figured I would just keep it as a backup with a working OS on it just in case I got into problems with the new install). As you can probably tell, I don’t know much about the process and I’ve always been impressed with the feedback on this forum.

Thanks

jcoltage
Nov 20th, 2007, 02:14 PM
Hey man I just installed a 400Gb SATA WD on my Asus A8N-E .. all I can say is that my mobo is really slow because of the IDE and SATA 300 (AKA 2.0) so I tossed my 40 gb and went all SATA .. Good Luck with your upgrade

lifeguard23
Nov 20th, 2007, 02:51 PM
So once you installed the SATA you noticed a significant slow down?? You think this was becuase of the COMBINATION of SATA and IDE together? And then when you removed the IDE drive things were fast again?

rabbit
Nov 20th, 2007, 05:34 PM
You're not limited to only two HDDs. You have four SATA ports and two IDE controllers. If you wanted to, you can have up to eight HDDs.

Just plug the SATA drive in. Go into the BIOS settings and make sure that the SATA controller is in IDE compatible mode, and not ACHI or RAID. I think the default setting is usually IDE compatible.

Do your thing ... clone C, etc., and when that's done, go back into BIOS settings and change the boot order.

Installing SATA drives are easier than IDE ones. There's no need to worry about jumpers :). Everything else is the same (except for the compatible/ACHI/RAID thing).