SATA hard drive

[Enigmatism]

No, this is not a "Why can't the computer recognize" thread for the SATA hard drive. It is actually a much simpler question. But thanks to Spyder for covering that part.

When I first assembled my computer, my motherboard was fortunent enough to come with a SATA driver floppy. When I first turned it on, I had the windows CD in the CD drive and when I told it to load the Operating System, it said I didn't have a hard drive. To prevent myself from posting a "Why can't the computer recognize" thread, I did what all people should do: Try to do all they can on their own with the given options. I noticed that at the Windows installation screen, "Press F6 for 3rd party drives" appeared for a couple seconds. I pressed it. It told me to insert a driver disc in Drive A:\. I did so. It gave me a list of drivers I could install from the floppy. I chose...Well its not important what I chose because whatever I did obviously made it work. So I got to the "Welcome to Windows XP" screen...yay...yeah, so I installed, blah blah blah, found that there was no sound...Yes i was angry but i found out it was because I didnt have any audio drivers. The CD for my motherboard was the solution, it came with many many drivers (one of them for RealteckAC97 Audio). So I installed it and everyone was dancing in glee... Then I had to install the ATI CD for my video card to have all the good qualities, and a bunch of other things.

>>THIS IS THE QUESTION PART!
When I was looking at the list of drivers the motherboard CD provided, I noticed something. It had the SATA drivers like the ones on my SATA floppy. Do I need to install those drivers too? (this was after windows and everything else was installed, the computer at this point was fully functional for all practical purpouses.)

**This is a MAXTOR 200Gb 7200rpm SATA hard drive by the way**

also.

When I looked at the HardDrive's Properties, it said it was a SCSI drive.

Why Does my SATA hard drive say its a SCSI drive?

What is RAID? Is featured on all SATA hard drives? How do I get it? Any special requirements from my computer? How do I know if I already have it?

If I didnt have the floppy, or Floppy drive, Could I have gotten the SATA drivers out of my motherboard CD before windows was installed?

[glc]

Do I need to install those drivers too?

Nope, unless you have a flagged controller in device manager.

Why Does my SATA hard drive say its a SCSI drive?

Not sure, but this is normal.

What is RAID?

Redundant Array of Individual Disks. It's a way to make multiple drives act as one. Don't bother unless you have specific reasons for using it, search the forums and read more than you want to know about it. It's not a drive thing, it's a controller thing, there's IDE RAID and SCSI RAID too.

If I didnt have the floppy, or Floppy drive, Could I have gotten the SATA drivers out of my motherboard CD before windows was installed?

Yes and no. You can probably extract the needed drivers, but you MUST have them on a floppy to install them using the F6 routine.

[Enigmatism]

Thank you for your help, I am now enjoying my great new SATA hard drive in all its 200 gigabites of glory. *the OS took up 11Gb, holy smokes!*.