hiya guys, I own an ASUS P4S8X mobo and been using two IDE HDDs for awhile. The issue arises when I find myself burning DVDs after DVDs just to make some space for my Photoshop scratch disk, so well, I bought a SATA HDD. The issue here is that I didn't check my mobo compatibility with SATA HDDs, luckily in the manual there are 2 SATA ports, and I did find two red cables which gave me great relief.. the thing is, I'm really uncertain of a few things : 01. The SATA cables weren't plugged in before and were only included in the Mobo box.. does this actually mean that the mobo wasn't designed for SATA HDDs or does any mobo packaged that way ? 02. Will pluggin out the primary IDE HDD and straightaway putting the new SATA HDD inside that slot ensures that the HDD will work straightaway ? 03. In conjunction with the 2nd question, should I plug my 2nd IDE HDD ( currently in slave IDE slot ) in the primary IDE slot, or should I just leave it as it is ? because I have two SATA slots ( primary & secondary, which I assume that I should use the primary one ) and two IDE slots ( primary & slave, both which are currently used ) and too much slots = CONFUSION !!! thanks a lot for ur time.. =)
Leave your ide hard drives like they are and if your mother board supports sata, just plug it in and everything should be ok. It will recognize it. And show up as a seperate drive.
The thing is my PSU can only support as much as 2 HDDs so I will have to take one out.. sad but true >_< and even if I do that, what will happen to the IDE that was configured as master ? How can I configure the SATA so that it will be detected as master ? ( as in there is no jumpers in SATAs )
To the question of how to make it detect as master..make sure it is in the primary ide3 and then set it in the bios as the boot drive..top of the IDE heap so to speak...doesn't always work due to the bios being maybe older than the release of the sata drives..My work machine sees any Primary ide as the boot drive over the sata regardless of how everything is set..so I use the 250 sata as a dump drive for big files and boot off one of the others...your psu should have enough power..just give it a try
hm i'll give it a go. The reason I want the SATA as the boot drive is coz the sata has 16MB cache whilst the 2 IDEs only have 8MB. janrocks > so you're saying that even if I plug my SATA to the primary SATA and leave the IDE as it is ( ie. on the primary IDE ) the mobo will detect the IDE as the boot drive instead of the SATA ? That sucks >_< so maybe the solution is to plug the SATA on the primary SATA and the IDE in the secondary IDE huh ? can anyone confirm ?
Yeah..try it a few ways around.Set it as the first boot device and list it at the top of the hdd list and it should be fine.. I was just reporting on a bug in my Asus K8N mobo bios..yours may well be totally different
