Booting from a SATA disk

[Gswiss]

I’m considering assembling a new pc based on socket 775 running under XP Home - SP1. My questions may be naïve but some areas are gray for me.

Are there any boot problems with SATA disks or must you have at least an IDE disk to boot properly from C:? In your experience, are there better brands than others to avoid boot problems (I usually go for Western Digitals)?

How do you connect your DVD/CD readers to the MB if you only have one IDE channel available, all others being SATA?

Does PCI Express buy you anything if you’re an average user who is not a game addict or is this a new gimmick just to render old PCI cards incompatible?

Any comments would be greatly appreciated

 

[crjdriver]

You do not need a regular ide disk to boot. The system I am typing this on now has three sata disks installed and no pata [regular ide] disks. Note you MAY need to install sata controller drivers during the xp install. If you have an intel controller, windows has native drivers for that one. All other sata controllers; nvidia, via, promise, highpoint, etc will need drivers loaded.

You connect your optical [CD type] drives to the one ide channel on the board. You can connect two drives as master and slave on the one channel.

PCI Express has more bandwidth than agp, however if you have a good quality agp card, there is no need to go pcix. If you are going to buy a video card anyway, then I would go pcix.

 

[Gswiss]

On one of my PC's I currently have an ASUS P4P800 MB and am very happy with it. Would you also recommend ASUS for the 775 socket?

 

[Triple6]

Of course you don't need an IDE drive to use a SATA drive. The one problem that users come across when using a SATA drive is that you need to provide a SATA driver at the beginning of the Windows install for Windows to access the drive, once thats done its treated just like PATA(IDE) drive. WD is a good brand to go for, so is Hitachi and Seagate. Maxtor is currently having issues.

Most motherboards still have 2 PATA(IDE) connections. Some high-end boards even have 4. You can connect 2 drives per IDE controller. And you can also buy SATA optical drives.

PCI-Express is great for video cards. You'll notice that the top of line video cards are now only offered in PCI-Express like the X800XT and Geforce 7800. And its gonna be easier and cheaper to find video cards in PCI-express form then AGP in the not so distant future; actually even now that seems to be true. Thats because AGP 8X has run its life as the video card interface. Motherboards that have PCI-Express are generally newer and offer/support newer features. I don't think there are any 775 boards that support AGP, not that I've really looked. Boards with the 775 socket, Intel 900 series chipsets, are a newer generation then those of the 800 series chipset so the AGP to PCI-E change is only one of the most visible changes.

 

[Triple6]

Of course, ASUS is one of the top manufacturers. Others to look at are ABIT and Intel themselves.

 

[Gswiss]

Thanks to both for your comments

 

[prunejuice]

Of course you don't need an IDE drive to use a SATA drive. The one problem that users come across when using a SATA drive is that you need to provide a SATA driver at the beginning of the Windows install for Windows to access the drive, once thats done its treated just like PATA(IDE) drive. WD is a good brand to go for, so is Hitachi and Seagate. Maxtor is currently having issues.

Most motherboards still have 2 PATA(IDE) connections. Some high-end boards even have 4. You can connect 2 drives per IDE controller. And you can also buy SATA optical drives.

PCI-Express is great for video cards. You'll notice that the top of line video cards are now only offered in PCI-Express like the X800XT and Geforce 7800. And its gonna be easier and cheaper to find video cards in PCI-express form then AGP in the not so distant future; actually even now that seems to be true. Thats because AGP 8X has run its life as the video card interface. Motherboards that have PCI-Express are generally newer and offer/support newer features. I don't think there are any 775 boards that support AGP, not that I've really looked. Boards with the 775 socket, Intel 900 series chipsets, are a newer generation then those of the 800 series chipset so the AGP to PCI-E change is only one of the most visible changes.

That's not necessarily true. I believe the Intel 845's and beyond chipsets have built in SATA support.

I know that for a fact because I install XP on an MSI 848P that didn't require SATA drivers.
(The computer didn't even have a floppy drive.)

 

[Triple6]

Right, you kind of correct. Its Windows that requires the drivers, the mobo always supports SATA drives if it has the connectors. Any SATA controller that functions as a RAID controller requires the user to provide drivers at the instalaltion phase. The SATA controller on the i848 is accessed in the same form as an PATA drive, I forget the correct terminology. But if you have a Silicon, NForce, or a newer Intel chipset you need to provide the drivers for Windows as you do you with most SCSI controllers.

 

[Gswiss]

Triple6. Speaking of MBs, would you rate ABIT as high as ASUS as far as support is concerned, i.e. regular firmware updates. The ABIT site appears to look up to it. In comparison, GIGABYTE for example is terrible in that area.

I'm aiming for an ABIT AA8XE with a 925XE Intel chipset.

 

[crjdriver]

I have always had good luck with abit. In fact I have an abit board here that was pulled from an old build of mine that I upgraded to a newer board. It is an old kt-7a. Still running after 4+ years. I think my son wants to put free bsd on it.

 

[Triple6]

I've never contacted support from either Abit or Asus, but both provide decent downloads in terms of updates. But also know that more BIOS updates aren't always a good thing if they constantly fix tiny glitches because the product was shoddy in the first place. Quality and performance is what those two companies excel at.

 

[two1361]

well i have no complaints with my Giga-Byte mobo..... personally i would recommend Giga-Byte and ASUS

 

[bigbear]

Of course you don't need an IDE drive to use a SATA drive. The one problem that users come across when using a SATA drive is that you need to provide a SATA driver at the beginning of the Windows install for Windows to access the drive, once thats done its treated just like PATA(IDE) drive. WD is a good brand to go for, so is Hitachi and Seagate. Maxtor is currently having issues.

Most motherboards still have 2 PATA(IDE) connections. Some high-end boards even have 4. You can connect 2 drives per IDE controller. And you can also buy SATA optical drives.

PCI-Express is great for video cards. You'll notice that the top of line video cards are now only offered in PCI-Express like the X800XT and Geforce 7800. And its gonna be easier and cheaper to find video cards in PCI-express form then AGP in the not so distant future; actually even now that seems to be true. Thats because AGP 8X has run its life as the video card interface. Motherboards that have PCI-Express are generally newer and offer/support newer features. I don't think there are any 775 boards that support AGP, not that I've really looked. Boards with the 775 socket, Intel 900 series chipsets, are a newer generation then those of the 800 series chipset so the AGP to PCI-E change is only one of the most visible changes.

Can you explain what you mean (Maxtor is currently having issues) as I am about install a new Maxtor 160G sata disc

 

[lotuseclat79]

I've never contacted support from either Abit or Asus, but both provide decent downloads in terms of updates. But also know that more BIOS updates aren't always a good thing if they constantly fix tiny glitches because the product was shoddy in the first place. Quality and performance is what those two companies excel at.

If you think constantly fixing tiny glitches in the firmware is only a problem with the Mobo mfgrs, its a constant fact of life for the disk mfgrs! Its not usually because the product was shoddy in the first place that there are a lot of firmware upgrades, only that first releases of anything reveals problems in large customer base populations that are unavailable during beta testing for new disks that are difficult to locate without the larger populations of disks in use under varying user population circumstances. So, its not a problem seen only with BIOS updates.

-- Tom

 

[Triple6]

I'm starting to get the feeling you don't like me lotuseclat79 and you seem to misinterprete everything I say.

There have been reports that some Maxtor hard drives have an ussualy high rate of failure. I don't remember which models that were supposedly affected. A few years ago IBM had severe and widely published failures. Fujitsu did as well and ended up facing lawsuits. Fujistu no longer makes desktop IDE drives.