quick computer question... about sata HD's

4

4-Man Takedown

New member
I got a SATA drive and hooked it up, but since I didn't have a floppy drive for the drivers and I was installing windows onto it, I think it was just recognized as a regular IDE. Does anyone know if this is possible to change to SATA without reinstalling?

Thanks a lot.
 
If it's connected to a SATA controller .... it's SATA .... and will be listed in the Device Manager as an Ultra ATA device under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.
 
well, it's connected to the motherboard via the SATA wire. I was reading that I needed to hook up a driver for it to install windows on it, and I never did that, and I seem to remmeber it being considered a regular IDE drive in the bios, but I could be wrong.
 
As far as I am aware, if your drive is even seen by your system, and is plugged in to an SATA port, than it will run as an SATA drive. On most systems, SATA has to be enabled in the Bios.
 
bigwillz24 said:
If windows is able to see the drive what's the problem?
Click to expand...

Well, from the stuff I read on the net, it made it seem as though I would have had to do something more to enable the SATA, and in my bios I'm pretty sure it says IDE, nothing about SATA when it shows my "primary drive".

I remember during windows instalation it said, to install SATA or RAID drivers push F6 and insert floppy, I never did that either.

I've heard that SATA is a lot faster so that it why I would like to make sure that it's configured correctly, right now I can only get about 23 tracks untill the harddrive starts acting up, I'd like to see if I could easily get 24.
 
if this is a XP machine....upon setup....itll ask you if you want to install a 3rd party driver..and you will have to press F6 or whatever the key is.Then when prompted..you will have to have the driver for it...but if you installed it...and XP saw it and didnt give you any crap about not seeing any harddrives to install XP on...then id say your fine.



Is this XP or a earlier version of Microsoft?
And is this a 2nd harddrive?...or your master Harddrive?
 
It's XP and it's the master (only) harddrive in the system, but yes, I got the command to push F6, and then it just kind of skipped past it to installation, so maybe I am fine.

Although I could have swore I remember someone saying that you could instal a SATA as a regular IDE if you didn't have the drivers, this is where I may be wrong and the reason I'm confused.

I really don't know too much about PC's I was just able to get it put together and am trying to get it optimized for audio.

Thanks by the way for all your all's help.
 
Basically...i belive the 3rd party driver that XP asks for... is for a controller card you might have your HD's plugged into rather than on the mobo's IDE slots.Thats what that would be used for.
 
Ok, cool, thanks a lot.

It's plugged into the SATA things on my motherboard. I got one fo those shuttle xpc's with 2xSATA connections already on there.
 
4-Man Takedown said:
Ok, cool, thanks a lot.

It's plugged into the SATA things on my motherboard. I got one fo those shuttle xpc's with 2xSATA connections already on there.
Click to expand...

Then it should recognize the drive on bootup, and windows should recognize the drive.
 
S-ATA&P-ATA HDs

4-Man Takedown said:
Ok, cool, thanks a lot.

It's plugged into the SATA things on my motherboard. I got one fo those shuttle xpc's with 2xSATA connections already on there.
Click to expand...

Listen, I got a WD S-Ata HDs on my new pc, and I understand your frustration. It gave me a few white hair twice (if you know what I mean). Basically, it is faster than a reg HD 7200rpm, but you have to have the start up diskette of the Motherboard, as u already saw after u press F6 when installing it on the BIOS. If your mBoard is Asus, I could share mine with you..it is standard, nothing can go wrong (or worse). Let me know, I'll explain you exactely what to do. Indeed the BIOS doesn't recognize the S-ATA/P-ATAs as IDEs.

B in touch,
Freddy
 
I could be wrong, but I don't think you need to install the driver that Windows prompts for unless you are running a RAID array.
 
4-Man Takedown said:
I got a SATA drive and hooked it up, but since I didn't have a floppy drive for the drivers and I was installing windows onto it, I think it was just recognized as a regular IDE. Does anyone know if this is possible to change to SATA without reinstalling?
Click to expand...

SATA isn't a bus protocol. It's a type of wire. It's otherwise identical to parallel ATA. When they said you could turn it into parallel ATA if your machine didn't support SATA, they meant that you can buy a $20 adapter at Fry's that decodes the serial data stream and shoves it out as a parallel stream and vice-versa. It's roughly the same as the old parallel-serial adapters you could get for printers back in the 80s, just a lot faster and a wider bus.... :D

Yeah, the transfer speed cap between the drive and the controller is faster with SATA than parallel ATA, but that's purely a function of the physical interconnect, not software. (It's also completely irrelevant, as AFAIK there are no non-RAID drives made that can even saturate ATA66 except as a brief burst, much less ATA133, much less SATA....)
 
crankz1 said:
I could be wrong, but I don't think you need to install the driver that Windows prompts for unless you are running a RAID array.
Click to expand...

Way back I installed an XP that didn't know about SATA when installing. It would not install because it saw no drive. I had to do the F6 thing.

But the important thing is that it wouldn't see the drive without it.
 
crankz1 said:
I could be wrong, but I don't think you need to install the driver that Windows prompts for unless you are running a RAID array.
Click to expand...

i think for the most part this is correct. the only exception is when your OS doesn't recognize the hard drives. mine are SATA and i didn't need to do any of that f6 junk when i reformatted. Once my XP was up and running, i used the ASUS driver CD to install the SATA Controller.
 
Whether or not you have to load your SATA drivers manually is directly dependent upon your motherboard and OS. On my newest motherboard I did not have to do any sort of F6 at windows install, nor did I have to load special SATA drivers for my system to recognize the drives.
 
That's pry what is meant by 3'rd party drivers .... when an additional SATA controller is used (non integral of the mobo).
Mobos that contain SATA controllers will provide support via the BIOS. Granted, this function may need to be enabled during BIOS setup for a drive/drives to be recognized.
I'm in the same camp with xstatic, in that my main computer needed no additional drivers to recognize the SATA controllers and configuration of RAID is all done in BIOS setup.
This is on a mobo that uses the Intel 875P chipset. Mobos that use the Silicon Image PCI SATA controller may require the additional drivers. However, the Silicon Image or any PCI SATA controller isn't recommended for DAW use in that it will create PCI bus bandwidth contention (clicks, pops and drop-outs) between other PCI devices. Namely that nice PCI soundcard one may be using.
If you don't have native SATA support via the chipset, you are best off to just use regular IDE drives.
 
You mentioned only being able to do about 22 tracks then the harddrive gets overloaded. You also mentioned that this drive was your only drive. It is recommended that you use a 2nd hard drive to put the actual audio on (wav files) and then your main hard-drive to put the program files on. Each of the drives will not have to work as hard, and you should be able to get over 22 tracks, as long as ram and cpu aren't holding you back.
 
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