adding a second sata drive

[SteamWake]

I am considering a second drive for my desktop.

Now I know you can pretty much drop in and plug in a sata drive no pesky master slave cable select issues.

But... I know that IDE busses (on certain mobo's) had issues with an upper limit on storage capacity.

The drive I am considering is a Terrabyte. Is there any such issues with sata buses?

Western Digital 'Caviar"

http://techreport.com/articles.x/15363

[Arclight]

Not that I know of, but good question.

I think those limitations for IDE applied to a single drive. If the controller couldn't handle more than 500GB, you could still plug in multiple 500GB drives.

* alright, here you go:

There are three factors: the HDD itself, the HDD controller on your mobo, and the OS. Over a decade ago they went to using "LBA" for disk addressing. At that time they used 28-bit addressing for LBA, which allows for a maximum size to 138 Billion bytes (or, M$ Windows calls that 127 GB).

Around 2000 that system was upgraded to "48-bit LBA Support", which allows for HDD's up into the petabyte region! All three components of the system need to support 48-bit LBA for this to work. Whether or not your mobo's HDD controller has this should be available from your mobo manufacturer's website. Look for statements about "48-bit LBA" or HDD's over 127 GB. Just plain "LBA" or "Large hard drive" is not clear enough. WARNING: If you try to use an OS that allows larger drives when the HDD controller does not, you could corrupt your drive. Basically in some situations the OS may try to write to an area above 127 GB, but the controller will fail to pass on the full address, and the write operation will happen near the start of the drive, corrupting what's there.

As another clue, ALL SATA drive systems (controllers and HDD's) support 48-bit LBA - the new system was in place when SATA was introduced, and it was built into the SATA designs. So in your case if you are installing a SATA drive, for sure the HDD and its controller will be OK.

On the OS side, it also needs to support 48-bit LBA. Windows 2000 did not until a later Service Pack (I think 4, but I'm not sure). Win XP originally did not; it was added with SP1 and continued thereafter. If you don't have SP2 installed (or at very least SP1), download and install now.

** http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/...6170_14_0.html

[SteamWake]

I actually read that article after I posted this but thanks. It would appear that the maximum has been raised quite a bit to the 'petrabyte' range so a Terrabyte should be no problem.

What will be a problem is moving all the crap around... Oi...

[d@rk51d3]

Just be prepared to do some cable and jumper pin juggling on the IDE.

When I did mine, the IDE drive would conflict with the SATA, and the IDE would be forced off the list, or sometimes into slave mode, and would try booting from the SATA instead.

Apparently quite normal behaviour.

[SteamWake]

The only IDE drives are the twin dvdrw's.

There are no fixed disk IDE drives on the system. Just one Sata that has run outa space.

[CaptainHaplo]

You should be fine then. Make sure your current drive is on the MB Sata0 port - and the new one to Sata1. This will make sure the pc doesn't try to boot off the new one.