|
|
|
re: Need advise on using SATA hard drive on a 478 board
Monday, June 16, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Jim McDonald
(25 messages posted)
Thanks for all the advise. From what you all have said it seems that PATA are more
reliable(as far as connection is concerned) yet they may be a bit slower. My experience
is that sometimes there seems to be no reason for my hard drive not booting and the
bios indicates an error. Usually a moving in and out of the IDE cable or tightening
brings back the connection.
It seems that companies are selling more SATA than PATA these days and eventually
SATA's may be the only ones on the market to buy. I seem to buy a hard drive every
two to three years.
Jim
On Monday, June 16, 2008 at 9:33 am, C K wrote:
>Along with all of the other replies which have valid points, there are a few other
>considerations to take into account.
>
>IME on thousands of machines that I have built or repaired, I can offer the following
>issues that I have observed.
>
>1) If you try a new or known good IDE cable, then you can have broken connectors
>or solder joints on either the HDD printed circuit board or the motherboard.
>
>2) loose jumpers on the HDD can be more problematic than data cable connections,
>so make sure the jumper is tight on BOTH pins, not that it just feels tight. On
>some, and especially older drives, this can cause a drive to not be detected at
all.
>
>3) if all else fails, try another HDD. A drive (or a motherboard) can have intermittent
>failures, and oddly enough, moving connections can cause it to "cure"itself for
a
>little while. If the HDD manufacturer has a diagnostics utility, run it and see
>if it report anything. Just because it may say nothing is wrong, doesn't mean there
>isn't IME..
>
>4) lastly, I have found SATA connectors to be worse than PATA connectors. Not
all
>of the wires or pins are used in a PATA connector believe it or not. The worst
connector
>is the power connector on a PATA drive (and not any better on a SATA drive either).
> I've seen many broken solder joints on printed circuit boards and loose sockets
>that plug into the drive. Make sure all of the female ends are tight enough on
the
>pins. Bend them closed a little just to make sure. I do this as a matter of routine.
> Just an once of prevention down the road...
>
>You can run PATA and SATA drives together but as noted before, there can be issues
>when both are connected when trying to install WIndows. Many BIOS' will still give
>preference to the PATA IDE when the drive or partition is marked active and a bootable
>system is found on it. So install with only the SATA connected if you decide to
>add a SATA controller board. Then connect your PATA drives and see what happens.
> If you have issues, then you may have to put your PATA drive in a USB encloser
to
>off-load any data etc, then format it, or use a utility or disk management to remove
>the active status, repartition and reformat it.
>
>The last note is that you will have to load drivers from the floppy drive for the
>SATA card at the very beginning of an XP install for the drive to be used as a boot
>drive/system.. A SATA drive will be a little faster but that all depends on other
>factors such as buss, CPU and memory speed of your system. It may or may not be
>worth the money..
>
>
>
|
All messages in this thread [show all]
 | |  | re: Need advise on using SATA hard drive on a 478 board (Jim McDonald: Mon, Jun 16, 2008, 1:20 pm) |
| |
| |
Return to the Windows XP Discussion Forum
|
|
|
|
