[ale] adding a new HD

Brian Pitts brian at polibyte.com
Thu May 29 14:59:59 EDT 2008


Paul Cartwright wrote:
> ouch.. ok, I need a lesson in SATA drives I guess..
> I had an old spare 160GB IDE drive that I "thought" I would add to my new DELL 
> PC. It has a ( almot full) 250Gb SATA drive. When I opened it up I saw the 2 
> drive bays on the bottom of the PC, and a spare power cord, but no double 
> ribbon cable or IDE cable. SO.. what gives? I read the MANUAL ( almost as 
> useless as MAN pages) and all it says is to "plug in the cables"  set it to 
> ON in the BIOS and voila!
> Looks like you  add a second ribbon cable from drive 1 to drive 0, with the 
> primary cable going to the motherboard from drive 1? or is it the other way 
> around...
> any other gotchas??
> dare I ask for a favorite SATA drive?

Serial ATA drives use different data and (normally different power 
connectors than parallel ATA drives. SATA uses one device per cable.

It's a little confusing to refer to PATA as IDE, since SATA drives can 
operate in an IDE emulation mode on motherboards that don't support AHCI.

You can buy 750GB SATA drives from various manufacturers for around 
$120. Here's a link to one of WD's new GP models.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136150

-Brian


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