SATA and you

[veeneedefeesh]

Ok so the new Dells are coming with SATA drives, occasionally I need to pull data off an unbootable drive so I gets myself a SATA caard and a few things strike me right off the bat.

1.) how does SATA determine Master vs Slave status? There are no jumpers on SATA drives.
2.) how the heck do you format a SATA drive positioned on a SATA PCI card (looking into this now, will post an answer) The Disk admin in 2K sees that there is another drive there, but it wont let you partition or format or even give it a freaking drive letter....technology is a pita

[10sun]

SATA determines master / slave based upon the channel. Usually they are paired.

-Adam

[veeneedefeesh]

I dont think we are talking about the same thing Ten-Sun

The New Dell Optiplex GX-280 comes with a single SATA hard drive, no IDE Hard drives at all, tho they still use the IDE channel for CDROM, CDR, DVD, etc. This presents a problem as that the SATA drives have a completely different port in them than IDE drives thus you cant plug them into anopther machine to get data off of the drive unless you have some sort of interface card, so I got one.

The Maxtor SATA/150 PCI card I got has 2 SATA ports and one IDE port on it. I plugged it in to my GX-270 and plugged a single Seagate 80GB SATA hdd into port 1 of that card. The Disk Manager in 2K could see that there was 80GB of unpartitioned space out there, but wouldnt let me create a partition. What I found out after reading the manual is that you have to go to the manufacturer of the drive's website and download a initialization program which will partition and format the drives. I am hoping that Dell has those on their website for all the drives they use so I dont have to have 15 of these darned initialization programs on my computer. Part of the intiialization routine asks how you want to use the device (as a boot disk keeping your old IDE drive, a boot disk discarding your old IDE drive, or as additional storage. So it appears that the initialization routine somehow "jumpers" the drive internally.

Now my next question is with IDE drives you could only have 4 drives (primary master and slave+secondary master and slave, this also includes ATAPI devices like CDR's etc) which to be honest just sucks. So I wonder whether you can have 2 SATAs on one channel like with IDE or maybe even daisy-chain the bastards like SCSI (btw these drives show up as SCSI drives) If so then great you could potentially have an unlimited amount of HDD space, if not then limiting your system to one or two HDDs just plain old stinks. I need to look at the motherboard on a 280, but I am pretty sure I just saw one SATA port on it in which case that REALLY sucks.

Ahh well it will be a learning experience and a wqork in progress.

[10sun]

I have no idea, I have 4 independent SATA channels, one IDE channel. I believe that the maximum devices I can attach to my motherboard is 6, 4 SATA & 2 IDE devices.

Not to mention the standard floppy etc.

-Adam

[vonkaar]

SATA doesn't handle drives in the master/slave configuration that you are used to. You set primary drives in a seperate SATA configuration program... in any way you wish.

Most motherboards have 3 IDE (aka PATA) channels... 1 floppy and 2 IDE. That allows a maximum of 2 floppies and 4 IDE devices, such as hard-drives or CD-ROMs. SATA motherboards typically keep all 3 IDE channels and add 2 SATA channels, which can only support 1 device per channel - due to the nature of parallel communication vs serial communication. The benefits of 250v 2-phase power and pretty much every other aspect of SATA more than make up for this 'single' drawback. Even in the server world, many people are looking at SATA raid to replace ultra320.

[veeneedefeesh]

I was looking at it and in actuallity it adds drive capability (4 IDE + 2 SATA> 4 IDE). Still a major pita tho. I am waiting for my next 280 to come in and I am gonna blow it up and see what a fresh relaod is going to take, I also want to see if I can figure out how to put an old drive in a system, make it non-bootable and pull data off of it onto a replacement boot drive. or take a boot drive out of the system and put it into a existing system with a boot drive of its own, (IDE and SATA) and see which one overrides the other and boots.

Does every Drive manufacturer have its own "initialization" program to partition and format the new drives? If so why the hell didnt they send that with my new SATA drive that I ordered with my SATA card.

I hate when they change interfaces, it now means that I have to keep spare parts of two flavors instead of one. I now have to carry both USB keyboards for newer systems with no PS2 ports and also PS2 keyboards for my older systems that dont have USB slots, Sata Vs IDE is the same, Have to be very careful when dealing with other periphrals like printers, ordered a USB printer for a remote site the other day and realized that one the laptops that could possibly be plugging into that printer didnt have a USB port. I dont want to even think about how many different flavors of memory I have to keep around.

I am all in favor of technological advances, but my inventory is perforce growing because of it.

[vonkaar]

I also want to see if I can figure out how to put an old drive in a system, make it non-bootable and pull data off of it onto a replacement boot drive. or take a boot drive out of the system and put it into a existing system with a boot drive of its own, (IDE and SATA) and see which one overrides the other and boots.

No guesswork is needed... you set which drive you want to boot manually.

In fact, that's my most embarrassing PC habit... I probably rebuild my main PC 3 or 4 times a year... usually with newer, bigger HDDs. The way I do this is... what 'was' my C drive, gets bumped down a letter when I install my new one. Atm, I have 8 drives in my system (2 are in . 5 of them have windows directories and old swap stores haha. They were all boot drives at one point. Even the old 15Gb (M drive) is still in there. I have 2 IDE drives (15 and 60Gb), 2 optical drives (dvdrw / cdrw) 2 SATA drives (80 and 120) and 2 SATA drives (pair of 36Gb in Raid 0 -extra SATA Raid card). The IDE drives are all on a second 350w PSU, in case you were wondering.

The EASY solution would be for me to just fucking drop a few hundred and get a fucking monster drive... like... this .



The problem is... I just keep running out of room. The MP3s are pretty fucking insane. It's at the point now that people stopped asking if I had a certain artist... they just played it.

[veeneedefeesh]

yea I am considering rebuilding my system at home for more capacity. I only have one IDE slot open on my system and I really am thinking that if I am going to increase anything beyond that I am just going to build a whole new system.

Downloading movies is such a resource hog. I am holding firm at about 4GB of music, but one movie is typically just shy of 2 GB and I would like to be able to keep movies for a while, maybe even permanantly.

Thanks for all the input guys I really appreciate you sharing your expertise and knowledge.

[runamonk]

SATA doesn't handle drives in the master/slave configuration that you are used to. You set primary drives in a seperate SATA configuration program... in any way you wish.

Most motherboards have 3 IDE (aka PATA) channels... 1 floppy and 2 IDE. That allows a maximum of 2 floppies and 4 IDE devices, such as hard-drives or CD-ROMs. SATA motherboards typically keep all 3 IDE channels and add 2 SATA channels, which can only support 1 device per channel - due to the nature of parallel communication vs serial communication. The benefits of 250v 2-phase power and pretty much every other aspect of SATA more than make up for this 'single' drawback. Even in the server world, many people are looking at SATA raid to replace ultra320.

Correct. It works just like traditional SCSI when you set it up. It's all done through the controller bios. You'll see it come up after the initial post tests.