Hi! First time SATA

Hello,

I'm an avid visitor to MajorGeeks, but only recently noticed the forum. I figured I would ask my question here as who better to ask than major geeks?

Anyway, I've recently decided to thin out some of my harddrives (3 IDE) for a bigger SATA drive (300 GB SATA MaxLine III) (I might keep some IDE for now). Now, basically my question is what should I do? Do I have to set up RAID? I was under the impression that RAID was really for multiple drives, so does it make sense to set it up for this? Or does it have to be set up as raid because it's SATA? If not, is it better to? It doesn't have to be my boot drive, if I choose to keep an IDE or two, although I suppose it makes sense for the fastest drive to be the OS's drive, but I'm not sure if I want to re-install and start from scratch with all my programs etc. installed.

It was an OEM drive, so unfortunately it didn't come with any docs. It's set up, it was "unallocated" under windows disk management, but some windows auto-setup took care of that. It still has not been formatted or ready to use in windows yet (an option after right-clicking it to set it up under windows).

I'm just wondering, if this was your drive, how you would set it up (remember, this is my first SATA drive, and for some reason I'm under the impression that these things are greatly dirfferent than the normal IDEs I'm used to.

I have an MSI Neo2 Platinum mobo.

All your advice is appreciated!
Thanks!
Rege

 

You can't use RAID with 1 HDD. You do not have to use RAID at all. Just use it like you would use any other HDD.

 

You'll have to refer to the manual for the exact bios settings, my old Nf2 board I had to list it as a scsi drive. But the one thing you have to do is to use the sata pre-installation drivers when doing a new install of the os, the mobo should have pre-install sata and preinstall sata raid driver, makse sure to use the non raid. Put the drivers on a disk and press F6 when prompted for 3rd part drivers during windows installation. Everything else is same. Btw don't have any ide drives plugged in when installing the OS on sata, cause if you didn't configure the bios properly, windows will install the os to the ide and you'll think is it on the sata.