Can I use SATA drives as well?
Saturday, 04 December, 2004
I have a Gigabyte 8IPE1000pro motherboard.
The primary IDE channel has a Pioneer DVD burner and a Western Digital 120G hard drive. The secondary IDE has two more Western Digital 120G hard drives. I'm also running an external USB 120G hard disk.
Can I run two more SATA hard drives? Does the SATA cable supplied with my motherboard power the drives? My 300 watt power unit has two spare plugs. Do I need to buy a bigger PSU?
Mike Gatch, Ballajura, WA
 Yes, you can run two SATA hard drives in addition to the three IDE drives you already have, and the external USB drive you also have.
In fact, if you install extra drive controllers, make use of other USB ports for external drives, and use whatever other connection setup you can find, you can have considerably more drives than that installed. You’ll be a bit restricted if you partition those drives, of course, because Windows allocates a drive letter to each partition. But all up you have drive letters available all the way from C to Z, and if you remove the floppy drive and disable it in BIOS, you can use A and B as well. You can only use A and B for removable drives however.
 I’m sorry but you’ll need power connectors for the SATA drives. They don’t get powered from the motherboard. If your power supply unit does not already have SATA power connectors on it (they are different to ordinary molex power connectors) you can easily obtain adaptors (such as the one show here) to use when powering the drives.
You’ll need to take all the components in your PC into account when determining if your power supply unit is adequate for the equipment installed. An on-line calculator like this one provided by JS Custom PCs
Hope that’s helpful, Terry O'Shanassy
 Reader solutions
JohnPosted: 21/10/2005 re: Can I use SATA drives as well? To Rusty and Larry - sorry this is late but try flashing to the latest BIOS first, then disconnecting your IDE drives, connecting your SATA drive and installing XP. When the system boots okay from the SATA, reconnect your IDE drives. Before rebooting, alter the boot order in the BIOS to put the SATA drive first with the IDE drives after that. I have a Gigabyte GA 8IPE1000 v.2 which is almost identical to your mobos, and this worked perfectly for me when I did it 2 weeks ago. I boot from the SATA now, and can fully access my 2 IDE drives without any problems. Hope this helps even if a little late. RustyPosted: 07/12/2004 re: Can I use SATA drives as well? I'd suggest you look at getting something like an Antec 430W, which comes with 2 SATA power cables built in, and will handle the load you're likely to have running the extra drive/s, for not much over $100 or less if you shop around.
Off-topic here - I'm in agreement with Larry about Gigabyte boards needing to have the SATA drives mapped to the Primary IDE Channel in normal mode (non-RAID) to work as a boot drive properly, for XP even. Both my G/b boards have that problem, so I can't boot off my SATA drive if I have an IDE drive connected on the Primary channel, i.e. even when set to boot off the SATA drive, the IDE drive will still show up as c:. Admiral MichaelPosted: 05/12/2004 re: Can I use SATA drives as well? I know with my Western Digital drives, I dont need the special power plug. While it still has it, it also has the standard molex power plug. Larry JentzPosted: 04/12/2004 re: Can I use SATA drives as well? If you are running windows xp it will see the sata drive as you would expect if you have service packs1 or 2 installed. If you are running win98 you will have problems. I run a Gigabyte GA8PE1000pro as you have and am running win98 on partition c, and xp on d. The only way i could get 98 to boot was to set the bios setting to see the sata drive as the primary master. This however renders the primary ide port useless. Good luck. |