Sata Drive newbie

[The Dark]

Hi all. Am after some advice about the new system we are building. This is my first experience with Sata II drives. I have got an Asus P5VD2-VM motherboard and a Seagate 150Gig Sata II hard drive and a western Digital 250gig Sata II hard drive. My question is on how to plug them in .. can I plug them in with 2 on the channell like a master and slave IDE drive?..is there 2 SataII channels on this board and can be be plugged in as 2 separate drives?. I have built quite a few system using IDE drives but am a bit confused by Sata right now..any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Äߧý∩†H♠H䎀]

Well the power plug goes in as a master & slave drive. Just plug those in. Then on your sata controller plug them in to 2 sata ports a sata cable routed for each HD. Thats the smaller of the 2 plug ins.

 

[The Dark]

can you plug 2 drives into 1 sata port as a master slave as you can with 1 ide channel? I am not sure that the motherboard has 2 ports. The motherboard is at my brothers house and cant check it tonight.

 

[Raffaz]

Its 1 SATA drive per cable, so no master/slave options. Most mobos come with at least 4 SATA connectors, so you will be fine.

 

[Äߧý∩†H♠H䎀]

Ya just look at your sata controller. I would find it hard to believe it only has 1 sata input. Mine has 6 internal and 4 external.

 

[The Dark]

just looked at the Asus site and it says 1 internal and 1 external Sata II port

 

[The Dark]

VIA 8237A South Bridge:
*2 x UltraDMA 133/100/66/33
*2 x Serial ATA with RAID 0, 1, JBOD function
JMicron JMB363 SATA controller:
*1 x Internal Serial ATA 3 Gb/s
*1 x External Serial ATA 3 Gb/s (SATA On-the-Go)
*supports RAID 0, 1 & JBOD

 

[Äߧý∩†H♠H䎀]

Well you just said it 2x Serial ATA drives

 

[The Dark]

so can you plug a Sata II 3Gb/s drive into a Sata 1 1.5Gb/s port?

 

[Äߧý∩†H♠H䎀]

Yes it just won't run at the Sata 2 rated speed it would run at sata 1 speeds or 150mb/s not 300mb/s like sata 2.