I'm contemplating the purchase of a 120gb WD SATA hard drive. My motherboard fully supports this technology as it is a very new, as in 2 weeks ago, asus. Now, i just needed some advice or information about what to do. First of all, if i get this hard drive, would it be better to run the operating system off my existing 40 gig parallel hd, or off of the sata (i'm assuming the SATA simply because of the better technology). Also, if it is better to place the operating system on the other hard drive, is it possible to switch it to the other one without formatting or reinstalling completely no the other one. Could i just copy and paste?

Thanks for any info

also, does anyone know how well the converters for sata work? you plug it into the parallel port and then you hook up your serial plug into it. I'm not sure if this would be worth it, or if it would generate any better performance.

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the sata drive will definitely be faster than your 40gb just because its a newer drive and im sure it will have 8mb cache. im not sure it will be worth the trouble to move the OS over though... if it were me i'd just slice off a 10-15gb partition from the 120 and do a fresh winxp install on it.

the sata-pata converters work well, but you definitely wont see a performance increase from it. in theory there should be a bit of a performance decrease, but its negligible. oh yeah, and hot swapping does work with the sata converters as long as your psu doesnt freak out when connecting something.

Mee prettty much covered everything. If you want to move your OS, you'll need a utility to do that. Copy and paste won't make all the changes nessary. I've used Norton Ghost for that in the past, but there are other programs too.

I'd recommend not putting the OS on the SATA drive, as most OS's have trouble booting off of the SATA drives. For saving yourself a headache, I'd recommend installing the OS on the 40 GB IDE drive. You can than use the new SATA drive for *everything* else, meaning all your programs, data, etc. (Well, put some data on the 40 gb drive so you don't waste all that space). ;)

I recommend using the OS on the SATA. Most OSs have drivers for SATA controllers and have no problem using them. The speed is amazing. I love my SATA.

I havn't herd of any boot problems from SATA, sounds like a hardware problems to me. Well, you can do what you want. I'd let my plans for the SATA HDD dictate where the OS loads from. If you want to do somthing like video editing, I'd leave the OS where it is. You don't want you best HDD bogged down with an OS, editing software and clips.

boot off the 40 gig EIDE, put everything else on the SATA 120. you'll realize your best performance this way, as most OS'es can read/write to multiple IDE channels at the same time, meaning whatever OS you put on it can read/write to it's boot drive (the EIDE 40) and the programs drive (SATA 120) at the same time.

I am using a sata set up on my computer, You may need to contact Asus about your sata drive if you want to install windows on it. Windows will not recognize the sata hdd in setup so you need to install it as if it were in raid array (tricking windows) or a SCSI drive. bassicly you hit F6 durring the install and insert a driskett with the RAID drivers for the Asus Chipset (via or nVidia). I am running my sata as my only drive and it's a speedy little deamon. Also the what is the seek time on the WD drive? I am using a Seagate Barracuda and would just like to know. For ref my seek is 8.3ms

I had one 120 gig SATA drive for a while and it was moderately fast, but then I got as second and did SATA RAID and it was freakin awesome. I installed XP from scratch in 5 minutes with that setup untill one of my drives went south. I would say that if you are going to be albe to get a second serial ata drive in the semi near future that you should just boot from the 40 gig and then in a few months get the second hard drive and then mess around by reformating and booting from the SATA.