HD Confusion

[stringman]

I'm building my first PC. I had picked up a MAXTOR 160 GB ATA/133 HD for my old PC that I never got around to installing. My motherboard is an Asus P4C800-E. I was considering going with a RAID1 configuration but decided against it as I'm more concerned with user failure (deletiiing files) instead of HD failure.

So I purchased a Seagate 200G ATA/100 that I was going to run as the master and was planning on using the Maxtor as the slave for backups.

My question (finally) is the IDE connector on the motherboard supports Ultra DMA/100/66. WIll I be able to hook up the Maxtor or will I need an ATA PCI card? I will be running Windows XP. Thanks in advance.

[largosama]

The maxtor will work, just not at the full 133 mbps. It doesn't really make a difference if its for backups, because speed isn't really an issue. The difference between the two interfaces aren't that great as between 100 and SATA.
I'm suspicious though, because I though the p4C800 supported ATa 133 being so recent and all

[Confused]

If I read the specs right on that board it has 3 IDE. 2 ATA100 and 1 ATA133 that can be used in a raid setup. It supports up to 6 IDE devices.
Chas

[stringman]

Correct. The ATA133 is for use in a RAID setup. So being as I'm not setting up a RAID configuration, I can't use that ATA133 connector, correct?

[Vlad16]

Actually the P4C800-E does NOT support ATA RAID, just SATA RAID. The RAID controller is for SATA (the ICH5-R southbridge also supports RAID for SATA).

http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=P4C800-E%20Deluxe&langs=01