Panic! SATA devices.

[Cota]

I was just putting my new system together and ran across a problem. I bought all SATA (never used it before) equipment: Motherboard, DVD, Harddrives X2. It wasn't until I was to the point of connecting all the cables that I realized there aren't any cables with more than one connector on it. I have three devices and there are only two SATA connectors on the motherboard.

After one of those 'oh shit' moments, I did a quick google for SATA cables and didn't see any that had more that one connector. Did I goof? Does my motherboard only support two SATA devices?

-Cota

[Default]

Here are add-in controller cards if you want to go that route Try here.

http://www.newegg.com/app/manufact.asp?catalog=410&DEPA=0

 Here are two boards that support 4 sata devices,

ASUS A8V Deluxe    VIA K8T800 Pro    VIA 8237    1 AGP, 5 PCI    Realtek ALC850    2 PATA, 4 SATA (two from VIA 8237, two from Promise 20378 controller)    VIA 8237 and Promise 20378 both support RAID 0, 1, or JBOD    8 USB 2.0, 2 FireWire    Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet

MSI K8T Neo 2    VIA K8T800 Pro    VIA 8237    1 AGP, 5 PCI    RealTek ALC850    2 PATA, 4 SATA (two from VIA 8237, two from Promise 20579 controller)    VIA 8237 and Promise 20579 both support RAID 0, 1, or JBOD    8 USB 2.0, 3 FireWire    Realtek 8110S Gigabit Ethernet

Heres an article about them,
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1647381,00.asp

Lord, I love tabbed browsing!

[egrudzin]

Yeah, as Default suggests you have to get another SATA controller card to support additonal devices.  Unlike IDE I think SATA only supports 1 device per channel so the cables will not have multiple connectors.

[Cota]

Thanks gentlemen. I'll probably have to get a controller card. Too late to switch motherboards.

I've spent the last couple of hours in the anandtech forums reading up SATA. What a mess I've gotten myself into. If I had known then, what I know now, I would have skipped SATA altogether. The cables are nice though.

Everything was going so smoothly too.  

-Cota

[Purge]

since your board will also have PATA controller, you could always go with a converter for your last Serial drive.

Otherwise you're forcing your controller to work through your PCI bus rather than having it's own allocated path on the board.

Since you'd only be putting one device on the PATA controller, you shouldn't see much difference in the performance (you wouldn't have seen much anyways).

here's one for 10US (ebay)

[Cota]

Haha, I win.

/crotchgrab

/trashtalk

My motherboard has two SATA connectors and two SATA raid connectors. Apparently I can disable the raid in the bios and use those two as regular SATA connections for a total of four.

The only question that remains is whether or not I'll be able to boot from an SATA optical drive. I'll find out shortly. Soon as I find the nerve.

-Cota

[Default]

Listen, either grab your crotch or talk trash but don't do both  :mrgreen:
What board do you have?

[Cota]

I bought the Asus P4P800-E Deluxe. It ended up being pretty easy, but it could have been difficult. Win XP boot disc doesn't recognize SATA. You have to provide a floppy disk with SATA drivers on it during the Win XP install unless your motherboard has 'native' SATA support. (Or make a special install CD through some process called 'slipstreaming' which looked more complicated than I wanted to deal with.) I didn't put a floppy drive in my system, so I was worried I'd have to go out to buy a floppy drive and disk.

This board though, supports the first two SATA channels through the bios and after Win XP is installed you can install drivers to access the two raid channels as normal SATA channels fora  total of four regular SATA connections. Then there was question about whether or not you could boot from an SATA optical drive (which is what I bought), but it turns out you can, at least with this mobo. So at one point it looked bleak and like it might take more trips to the store and online returns and exchanges. Plus I was trying to hurry and get this done in time for EQ2. But it all worked out fine without any more trips or purchases.

-Cota

[Default]

I used an Abit av8 for my brothers comp. Loading the os was a pig becuse I kept loading the wrong drivers for the sata. Can't wait for my upgrade cycle...