Serial ATA add-on card

A friend gave me a new SATA WD 80G hd, but my motherboard doesn't have SATA connectors. I found this card for $16, a "Buslink 2-Port Serial ATA RAID PCI Card". This is what I need, correct?

http://www.gearxs.com/gearxs/product_info.php?products_id=3590

Thanks much,
Harold

 

Yep.

Martin

 

Excellent. Thanks. Ordered it today.

I've never used one of these add-on cards before. I want the SATA drive to be my primary master. How will my bios read that? Will I still be able to use my IDE drive as a slave? Should I set the jumper on the IDE hd as a slave (and use the slave connector on the cable), or leave it as the master and assume the bios will sort it out?

Thanks,
H

 

SATA uses point to point wiring rather than a bus. That means for every port on the adapter card, you connect one hard drive. There is no master and slave, or primary/secondary bus.

Lower numbered SATA ports will show up first in your BIOS and in the Windows drive letters unless you intentionally change it. I'm not sure whether EIDE drives will show up before or after SATA drives in Windows by default. It probably depends on your BIOS and how you configure it.

I'm much more familiar with Linux. In Linux, the SATA driver (libata) uses the SCSI generic driver layer and shows up as /dev/sdX rather than /dev/hdX for IDE drives.

Maritn

 

I realized I didn't actually answer your question.

That's what I'd do.

Martin

 

Thanks Martin.

I tried to install today, it didn't go so well. I unplugged both my ide drives and installed the SATA card and hd and booted up. The computer saw the drive and showed an option for entering the RAID configuration menu. The first time I ignored it and it booted into the XP installation cd but when it came time to install it said there was no hd to install to. So I rebooted and went into the RAID setup. I low-level formatted the drive from there and tried XP installation again w/same result. I went back into the RAID setup but none of the other options worked because it said there was only a single drive. I hooked my ide master hd back up and tried XP installation again but it only read the ide drive, not the SATA.

Just for the heck of it when I booted back into Windows on my ide hd, I installed the SATA card drivers. According to Device Manager both card and hd are fine, yet the SATA hd does not show up in "My Computer".

Thanks for any suggestions,
Harold

 

You have to format the drive first (not lowlevel). Don't remember exactly where it is.. somewhere in the control panel.

 

Ah! Thanks Stephen. Will do.

H

 

Ok, got the drivers loaded and the installation seems to be going fine.

Thanks,
H