i want to get a new Harddrive (Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB 7200 8MB ATA-100 EIDE OEM Hard Drive WD2500JB at TigerDirect.com) and i was wondering if it would work good with my old Hard Drive, and my new Asus A8S-X Socket 939 ATX Motherboard
There shouldn't be any issues with that drive. Just make sure that you have at least Service Pack 1 installed if you're using XP or SP4 if you're running Win2k, or the full amount won't be recognized.
well im getting ide because i already have an ide, unless i have have one ide and one SATA, that would be cool, but i have windows XP service pack 2
Thats cool as long as you r satisfied.... It was just one's openion coz comparitively they costs same but speed matters....
XP SP2 supports SATA drives. Windows won't whine at you as long as you don't put a clean install on it (in which case you use the SATA floppy drivers). But if your boot OS is on your IDE and you just install your SATA, it will just auto detect and install the appropriate mass storage drivers.
You're right, XP SP2 does support SATA drives. So does XP, XP SP1, and Win2k. It's still the ATA interface at the basic level. The changes are mostly physical, and I believe there's some signaling changes to go with theem, but SATA is still ATA, so we're not talking a brand new storage interface from the ground up. Therefore, SATA does not require XP SP2. However, with the 48-bit LBA barrier, the hardware, which has been addressed for a few years, requires a software compliment. That's why XP out of the box requires SP1 or later to properly recognize the full size of any hard drive. If your thinking was correct, I couldn't have installed Win2k on my 80GB SATA drive...at least without drivers, which I didn't need. Had I had a RAID array set up, I would have, but that's very common.
