SATA?.. oops

I think I made a mistake. I bought a 74GB WD Raptor, not realising that SATA uses different connectors (I guess I've gotten a little behind on the new HW stuff). I was planning on setting it up Raid 0 with my existing HDD.. but I don't think my motherboard (ASUS P4P800 Deluxe) will support it.

Is there a way to run a SATA HDD off of this mobo, or do I need to send the drive back because I'm an idiot?

 

you can get a SATA PCI card.

 

damn.... is it worth it for just this one drive? How much $$ is a SATA card?

 

Hang on.. I just took a look at my mobo box and it says "Intel SATA with RAID".

Looks like I'm gonna have to dig through my box of cables and see if I can find one...

 

Unless your older drive is SATA as well, you still won't be able to RAID them.

 

it's really small and i believe it's on the bottom right somewhere... top left of the case component pins. Yeah... i dislike these new technologies. the connectors got smaller, but the motherboard didnt' shrink with it, so it's really hard to find those darn connectors.

 

Yeah, I figured I wouldn't be able to RAID them since they connect differently.

I got the new HDD installed, and it shows up in my BIOS as "Third IDE Master". But when I go to 'My Computer' it doesn't show up. I was only installing it right now because I wanted to make sure it worked before I sent my rebate form in.

Eventually I want to use the 74GB Raptor as my primary HDD and use my old 120GB WD for data storage and such. But I don't have the time right now to swap my OS to the new HDD. So.. is it working? Device manager says it's working properly, but I haven't partitioned it or anything, so I don't know..

 

Ohh, one more question. I've ran out of unused power supply cables, so right now it's on the cable that also goes to my video card. I didn't really want to put it on that cable because I figured it might cause some stability problems with the card?? So would it be better to put it on a cable with the other HDD, or would it be better to put it on a cable with my DVD or CD burner?

 

does is show up in disk management?

go to start> run "diskmgmt.msc"

if you can see the disk in there, partition and format it.

if you cannot, you need to install the SATA driver package for your motehrboard. if you cant find the utility disk, you cang et it online at Asus

 

You'll have to install the SATA controller driver in Windows before it recognizes the drive.

I'd have the new drive share a connector with anything else that's fairly low wattage; any of the other drives would be fine. Don't know what vid card you've got, but if it requires its own power connector, it's no doubt drawing a lot of wattage all by itself.

 

Radeon 9800 Pro

 

Thanks.. formatting as I type.

 

It doesnt really matter too much what power connector you use, but as GT says I wouldnt have it on the same line as the Radeon.... those things suck a lot of power under full load.

Personally I like the SATA connectors, it sure beats trying to grapple with great big ribbon cables and massive connectors where the surface area of the contacting points is larger than the area of your hand holding onto it, so its really hard to pull out.