Expanding my hard-drives

Soul_Reaper

Ok, so right now I have 2 IDE hard-drives and I'm looking to pick up a 3rd.

My motherboard is SATA compatible, so I was thinking of going for one of those.

My question is, can I use SATA drives in addition to my IDE drives? And if so, can SATA drives be used by themselves or will I need more than one and set up a RAID?

Opologies if these are questions with fairly obvious answers but I haven't found any websites which have very helpful information, other than specifying what RAIDs are.

Rwolf

yes you can use SATA with IDE.
just like IDE RAID setups, you'll need a 2nd SATA HDD of the same kind to make a RAID setup.

on another note, if your installing windows from a fresh start, you will need your mobo's SATA drivers on floppy to insstall windows, or else it won't detect the drive.

Marine

[ QUOTE ]
on another note, if your installing windows from a fresh start, you will need your mobo's SATA drivers on floppy to insstall windows, or else it won't detect the drive.

[/ QUOTE ]

only true for addon cards, motherboards with native sata support work just fine, at least under xp with sp2

Rwolf

yeah, if you have a XP cd w/ the SP2. I don't so I found out the hard way :P