Christer Edwards wrote: > Afternoon, > > Santa was nice to me this year and I found myself the proud new owner > of a 500G WD (WD5000KS WD Caviar SE16) hard drive. It turns out, > however, that the drive uses SATA and my machines use PATA. I'm not > up-to-date on my hardware definitions so this is what I *believe* is > the situation. Bottom line they use different connections and I can't > connect the thing to any of my machines. > > Could anyone that is a little more up-to-date on hardware give me some > tips? Should I just go pick up a PCI SATA controller and connect it > that way? If so are there any restrictions on where I can use it? > ie; will the controller recognize the drive no matter the size or am I > also restricted on the size the BIOS will recognize? I was actually > planning on putting it in a fairly old machine that I use as a media > server. Or, should I return this drive and get one that is more > immediately compatible with my machine? > > Thanks > Find out your SATA drive speed:
SATA 150 or SATA I SATA 300 or SATA II Either get a PCI SATA card to match, or get the faster SATA II card since it'll run the slower SATA I drives and the SATA II drives. The drive size shouldn't be an issue with the PCI card - just make sure your Unix/Linux-based OS supports the drive size. I believe there's a good article in Wikipedia on Serial ATA that may give more information. Brandon Stout http://mscis.org /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
