I just got a 120 GiG Maxtor HD…but…im a little confused about the whole installation process of it! I mean i know before there was the ATA ribbon cable and the power cable, but now there is a thinner cable that comes with it too, and my mobo has a promis raid controller, of course i have only that drive and no other, and will use it as my master (duh!) but since i bought it in bulk meaning no manual or anything else, i dont know where to find more info on it, i wanted to know if anyone has installed one of these or any SATA drive and hooked it up to work on it’s on, meaning 1 DRIVE!! cause for raid, i know you gotta have atlast 2 or more drives for it to work!
Well first off, is the drive SATA compatible? Since it came with a SATA cable (the thinner one), i’m guessing yes. Now the controller on for the SATA should be somewhere on your motherboard. Since I don’t know your motherboard model, I can’t give you specifics. If you can’t find any place to connect that small ribbon cable, you may not be SATA-ready. You can probably still get a PCI card to give you SATA capability.
One consideration, though, is the speed of the actually drive itself. If it’s 7200 RPM or lower, then SATA will do nothing to it. SATA is useful for drives that can go 10000 RPM and faster. If it’s merely 7200 RPM, you may just want to go with ordinary UDMA-4, which your motherboard would undoubtedly support (most do these days).
the mobo is a Asus P4C-800 Delux (it’s wicked) and these motherboards, have an intregrated Promise RAID controller on board! so i know that’s covered, as for the drive, im not sure what speed it’s at! i guess i could just try and hook it up with a normal ribbon cable, like on the ones used for standard ATA and see how that works!
The question really was, do i need to use the thin red/black cable a.k.a SATA cable, and of course that would connect to my raid controller that’s on board, but since i have only one drive, what’s the point?
I mean raid is meant to be used with 2 drives or more…so since i have one, where does the RAID thing come into play?
so basically…hook up! the red (SATA) cable…to any of the (4 jacks on my mobo) the other end on the hd, hook up the power supply cable to the hd and set the jumper on primery, since it’s the only hd on board
i guess it’s good to go! and as for RAID, that’s a matter of enabling it on the motherboard from the BIOS, which i dont think i will do since, i can’t take advantage of it! I really wish there was an Illustrated tutorial how to properly install these new SATA drives…and with motherboards (like mine) that have a raid controller installed on the actual board, with upto for slots/jacks to hook up the HD’s…seems like a good idea.
