Question about SATA Raptor

[Mavtech]

I am thinking about buying a WD Raptor HD to put my OS and games on. I currently have the WD 120 GB 8 MB cache. My motherboard is the Asus P4C800DX. It has onboard SATA. To put everything on the Raptor, I can just clean the WD drive to a size to fit on a Ghost copy to go onto the Raptor right? I want to then delete the OS off the WD and use it as storage. Will this work? Thanks.

 

[Gravity]

I think that you might have to load the sata drivers from the MB. Do a search in this forum for SATA, there's been lots of discussion regarding this topic.

 

[Mavtech]

Getting the SATA to work shouldn't be an issue. I already loaded all drivers. I was just wondering about the cloning issue. I did one search on the ghost image to the Raptor. Everything should work right if the HD is the only hardware change right?

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: Mavtech
Getting the SATA to work shouldn't be an issue. I already loaded all drivers. I was just wondering about the cloning issue. I did one search on the ghost image to the Raptor. Everything should work right if the HD is the only hardware change right?

I would be suspicious of the fact that Windows Setup needs the SATA drivers in order to run and boot properly. You can give it a try by all means but keep a data backup and be prepared to do a complete reinstall.

-Por

 

[Mavtech]

I would make sure I could see it in Windows now before making it the system drive. I have heard a few people say you can have problems having one SATA drive and one IDE drive. Is that true?

 

[GunDog]

Originally posted by: Mavtech
I would make sure I could see it in Windows now before making it the system drive. I have heard a few people say you can have problems having one SATA drive and one IDE drive. Is that true?

I have 1 SATA WD drive, 2 30Gig EIDE drives and 7 Scsi Drives (arrayed raid5) and have no problems

 

[KrisMCool]

Don't know if this will help, but I just installed a Raptor on my P4C800D. I chose to do a clean install and reformatted my existing WD800JB to use as a back-up drive. I installed the Raptor on the southbridge SATA connector as I'm not creating RAID, so I was wondering why there was talk of installing drivers. The southbridge SATA connections don't need drivers (unless you're talking about chipset drivers which have to be installed regardless), only the Promise controller if that's where you're connected. If you're using a single drive, wouldn't you want to use the chipset to control the drive instead of the Promise RAID controller? Anyway, my system works well with no apparent conflicts between SATA and PATA drives. My only complaint is that the most recent BIOS removes the UDMA-6 choice and leaves UDMA-5 as the fastest setting. Still confused about that as the SATA drive can use the faster setting. Have fun with the Raptor - it's definitely faster in plenty of real-world uses.

 

[Mavtech]

Thanks. I'm buying one today. Dell lowered the price from $145 to $137 plus 10% off and free shipping.