Page 1 of A quick question about S-ATA drives

I am just about to build a PC for a friend and he is after an Athlon 64 PC, all others I have done recently have been Athlon XP, Sempron/Celeron as they were just for basic office use. (It was all 486/Pentium 1 & 2 when I did it for a living :B )

Just wondered about the hard drive, most of the socket 939 boards support S-ATA hard drives but have not fitted one before, I assume the data connector will be different to an IDE but does it still work the same way, 2 drives off one socket.

Also is the power connector different? I wouldnt have thought it was but saw an S-ATA power adapter on Ebuyer.

And lastly, I assume the additional IDE connector is for the CD/DVD rom drives or would you connect these to the S-ATA connection via an adapter?

Anything else I should know before ordering would be great.

All the best

Gerald.

your motherboard must be able to support sata drives you will need a sata/raid driver upon installing your o/s you hit f6 on boot up to install the driver pref from a floppy the sata connection is a flat cable only 1.5cm wide i allways use a decnt sata cable they are some rubbish about the power plug is a standard type :B

S-ATA drives are easy enough. You get a nice slim cable, connect one end to the mobo and the other to the drive! So only one drive for each port on the mobo. Power connectors depend on the drive, although there is a S-ATA power connector lots of manufacturers still put normal molex power plugs on the also, if the drive your looking at only has the S-ATA power connector, the either get an adaptor from ebuyer, or most modern PSU have at least one of the power connectors on it. Just one thing tho, if the drive has both power connectors ONLY use one at a time or it can kill the drive.

I beleive you can now get CD/DVD drives that use the S-ATA connector, but most still use ordinary IDE cables which plug straight into the mobo as before.

The only real pain about S-ATA drives is that you have to get the drivers for them before windows will install (without the drivers windows won`t recognize the drive). The drivers should come on a floppy with the mobo, then when you go to install windows you boot from the windoows CD, then pop the floppy in and just as windows begins there is a message at the bottom that says something like "Press F5 to install additional drivers". Thats not the actual mesage but you`ll know what I mean whrn you see it! Then just hit the button it says to, windows will carry on then may ask you to specify the drivers you want to use, choose the ones for your OS, and carry on. You know all is well if Windows detects your hard drive, then just carry on as normal.

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"The most overlooked advantage of owning a computer is that if they foul up there`s no law against whacking them around a bit."

My DVD Collection

Sorry guys, I did post a `Thanks For Your Help` message on Tuesday but looks like it didn`t save.

So, Thanks for you help, ordered Tuesday night, hopefully will all be here tomorrow.

All the best

Ger.