BF2S Forums What does it take to upgrade to a SATA hard drive

What does it take?
Making sure your motherbard has SATA ports. (I know, I know, stupid instruction, but you'd be surprised, some people have bought SATA hard drives and their motherboard not have any SATA ports!)
Slipstreaming SP2 onto a CD with Windows XP.
Installing Windows XP again, reloading all drivers, programs, ect.
I suggest RAID_0 for even more performance!
For RAID, you'll need a RAID driver boot disk when installing XP. (F6 at the beginning, it'll prompt you for it.)
The hard drives I like and suggest for all my peoples:
250GB:
500GB:
Hope that helps.

Edit: Damned amateur typing skills!

Last edited by WarriorDave (2006-11-27 13:44:33)

What are the benefits of having a SATA drive vs. a PATA?

SATA has more bandwidth than PATA. Larger drives usually have a faster burst access rate.

if your motherboard has sata ports you need to find out are they sata 1.5's or 3.0's. if your board supports 1.5 sata the benefits are very little. ( my gigabyte board is about a year and a half old and only supports 1.5) i changed over to sata drives and the only real benefit was the smaller cables over the wide ide cables giving me better airflow. i have heard some rumors of a faster sata 4.0 coming out after the release of vista. don't know if its true but a few months ago PC gamer had a small article about it.  but after building a friends machine with sata 3.0 hard drives and sata CD ROM drives i am convinced that sata is the way to go . his machine is fast as hell. put a disk in the CD ROM drive and the installation of games was cut in half.  the pairing of sata CD and hard drives is amazing. remember a sata hard drive can only take in as much as it is supplied by the CD ROM drive. once the program is installed it is also faster on game loading times.  like someone said above  "why not buy a SATA drive rather than a PATA one?" is true. if you are building a new system GO SATA IDE IS ALMOST DEAD . but if your board doesn't support it you are stuck with the IDE style.

You don't need to have SATA ports on your motherboard. You can always pick up a SATA controller to put in a PCI slot.

$105 US? Nah, thanks. I'll use mini-images.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

Cheez wrote:

leftoverkiller wrote:

sata CD ROM drives

WTF? How much did that cost?

They cost about as much as three regular CD-ROM drives. Plextor makes them (as far as I'm aware, it's an exclusive), and there have been a few reports as to instability.

SOLD!

WarriorDave wrote:

To date, there is no IDE drive that is capable of reaching 80MB/sec transfer rate.
The maximum transfer rate on the PCI bus is only 133MB/sec.
The maximum transfer rate of SATA is 150MB/sec, while SATA2 is 300MB/sec.

There's still an improvement, but not as much as pure SATA controllers on the mobo. Still you could buy the controller and later when you upgrade, you've got the SATA drive ready to go into the mobo, and ditch the controller.

I didn't say swap the boards now, I meant when and if you upgrade, get a board with SATA. But as an interim you could get a PCI controller card and the SATA drive so when you upgrade you can plug the drive right in.

EDIT: After re-reading this its all jiberish.

1. Buy PCI Controller card
2. Buy SATA Drive
3. Plug card into mobo, drive into controller card
4. Wait($however_long)
5. Upgrade - Buy new mobo
6. Plug drive straight in.

Last edited by Cheez (2006-11-27 18:09:07)

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

You don't have to reinstall Windows. If you've properly maintained your old installation, you can just mirror your copy over to the new drive (giving it the old drive letter), and then erase the old one or keep it around as a backup. Western Digital has free tools that accomplishes this easily.

Is that really possible, just copy the windows folder over to the new drive, giving the new drive the new letter, plugging the old one out, and then the new one in and lets roll?

Is this really possible