SATA hard drive question

Scooter70 · 15 Apr 2009

I didn't know where to put this, so I put it in General Discussion. Feel free to move it if there's a more appropriate place for it.

I'm looking for a new secondary hard drive for my 4 year old desktop. I want to get another year or so out of it and need more space for storage, so I figured I would get a good drive now and then move it to the next machine when I build it. Is SATA the right way to go? My motherboard has two Serial ATA connectors so I should be good to go, right? My master drive is IDE. Can the two live together in harmony?

Additionally, I have a 1TB MyBook that I would like to connect SATA for backup puropses. Is there some type of jack to connect one of the internal connectors to an external device?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

-Matt

metoo · 15 Apr 2009

Sata & IDE drive will live together fine. If your ext HDD has an esata connector then you could get a esata i/o port that runs off one of your sata connectors on the mobo. Otherwise your stuck with usb to connect the external.

Scooter70 · 15 Apr 2009

Thanks. I just found this on NewEgg. Looks like exactly what I need.

metoo · 15 Apr 2009

Scooter70 said:

Thanks. I just found this on NewEgg. Looks like exactly what I need.

That's the the one. esata is supposed to be hot swappable but I need to have my external drives pluggin and turned at boot time or they are not discovered if I use the esata connector, same on 2 machines I have. the speed difference between esata and usb is substantial

Crunchy Doodle · 15 Apr 2009

I concur. While eSATA is touted as hot-pluggable, my experience is like yours. The eSATA connection must be up at boot time or it's no go.

Bye.

metoo said:

That's the the one. esata is supposed to be hot swappable but I need to have my external drives pluggin and turned at boot time or they are not discovered if I use the esata connector, same on 2 machines I have. the speed difference between esata and usb is substantial

Scooter70 · 15 Apr 2009

Thanks for the heads up guys. I'm going to order the port, a cable, and a big HDD while I'm at it. My computer should be happy for a while now.

Dragonfly · 15 Apr 2009

Crunchy Doodle said:

I concur. While eSATA is touted as hot-pluggable, my experience is like yours. The eSATA connection must be up at boot time or it's no go.

Bye.

I use Akasa connectors which allow me to hook up bare SATA drives externally, and have no problems hot swapping drives. Not as elegant as eSATA, but it works for me.

kenabi · 15 Apr 2009

esata ports (are usually dedicated ports, and not just normal sata ports, though you can use them to connect externals at boot, but don't unplug them..) are utilized with the AHCI option in the ide/sata/ahci/raid settings

if the motherboard supports esata/hot swapping/etc, then you need to set your bios to use AHCI mode (which requires a bit of trickery with driver swapping to get working with a pre-existing windows install)

without AHCI enabled and the proper sata drivers installed, hotswap generally doesn't work. not to mention some boards won't run the drives at full speed when not in AHCI (which is native sata, and not ide compatible mode, usually)