sata drive connection

[rustywood]

i got a asus k8v mobo, with 4 sata connections, 2 say sata 1, sata2,other two say primary sata,secondary sata, am running one drive ,can i run it off any of these connections?

[delta013]

Your motherboard manual sould have infomation on which connectors to use for what.

Delta013

[RJ]

You can run the drive from any of these, however I recommend that you use the SATA 1 or SATA 2.

You should know, these four SATA ports are really not 4, but 2+2. The southbridge supports only 2 SATA ports, SATA1 and SATA2.

Now additionally you have a Promise controller which provides you two additional SATA ports, the PRI_SATA and SEC_SATA (and one more UDMA133 controller).

If Windows does not have drivers for the controller, then you'll need to press F6 during setup and insert the driver floppy that contains the drivers for the Promise.
If you use the native SATA ports (SATA1 or SATA2) no drivers are needed, because they are no drivers needed for native ports.

I'd disable the onboard Promise and use it only if you have optical drives to put on the native SATA ports, as it's been said that opticals don't like to be connected to external controllers, though that was for PATA and I don't know if that applies to SATA as well.

RJ

[rustywood]

well after 3 hours on a saturday trying to get the system to reconize the hard drive ,ifound on a support web site that if you run one drive you have to go into the bios and disable the promise feature since it was for raid,also you have to download a file from asus and load from floppy to get the system to reconize the single sata then load your o.s. and NO none of this was explained in mobo user manual,cause it sure would have saved me some time and hair pullin.

[antgross@pacbell.net]

Originally Posted by rustywood well after 3 hours on a saturday trying to get the system to reconize the hard drive ,ifound on a support web site that if you run one drive you have to go into the bios and disable the promise feature since it was for raid,also you have to download a file from asus and load from floppy to get the system to reconize the single sata then load your o.s. and NO none of this was explained in mobo user manual,cause it sure would have saved me some time and hair pullin.

If it was only 3 hours consider yourself lucky. I spent about half a day getting my WD sata drive setup. Of course, it didnt' help that my floppy drive was broken and so it was not reading the disk during f6 option. I have an asus board too, different model, but you're right, it only talks about setting up raid-doesnt explain how to setup non-raid.