OT Computer stuff again

Not totally clueless, just a bit confused when the HD came with an ATA PCI card. I understand these have a little bit of a bonus speed-wise over just connecting to the ISE connectors on the ASUS board.

Mike

Mike,

Three quick comments:

1. Sometimes CompUSA and BestBuy, etc will sell the combo package for the consumer to get a rebate. The card may or may not be faster than the IDE/ATA connections on the mobo. It all depends on the speed of the bios chips for that piece of the mobo. If you tell me which ASUS board you have, I can tell you what speed your mobo supports.

1. Some Computer Bios will not support a 160gig HD, so inorder to use the HD you would need a separate card that would support that large of a drive.

2. The newest HD's on the market use whats called SATA (serial ATA) and in that case you would probably need an expansion card to support the SATA drive, because not that many mobo's come with SATA built in. Some higher end boards have been released with the appropriate chips and connections. BTW, I believe a SATA connection on the mobo is red.

Shane

ATA and IDE are terms for the same bus. Some HD vendors include an ATA card with their ATA HDs to get around a couple of problems:

1. If you need more than 4 ATA devices (HDs and CD/DVDs) on your PC, then you need an ATA card to get more connectivity.
2. If you have an older MB, with an older BIOS, then you may need an ATA card (with its own BIOS) to support large HDs. Depending on the age of the BIOS, the HD size limit could be 128 GB or 32GB or 8GB or 2GB or ~0.5GB.

If you don't have either of those problems, then you probably don't need to use the ATA card, which will make your PC simpler because those ATA cards present their ATA HDs as SCSI HDs, which complicates initial OS installations.

Note that HDs bigger than 128GB require SP1 for XP. Spend some time googling on the microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware NG for more info.

Hi,

He will exactly lose 4.85 % like on every other hard drive, because HD manufacturers use factor 1000 to convert from kilo to mega and from mega to giga, which is not correct for computer usage, because your computer uses 1024, that would mean his bios is supposed to show him something around 152.6 GB.

bye

simon

It's an A7N8X deluxe.

Yeah, this board comes with the cabling for these drives and the board supports them but this HD is not SATA.

Mike

I have that file to install after things get setup for the first time, however, this is a fresh system, never started yet. Will the OS install ok allowing me to install SP1?

Mike

at 20 Aug 2003, Bob WIllard [ snipped-for-privacy@TrashThis.comcast.net] wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@TrashThis.comcast.net:

Not just those cards. The ATA/IDE controller on my ECS EliteGroups L7VTA appears to do the same thing. No problem though with either FreeBSD or W2K.

I haven't done it personally, but I seem to recall others mentioning that it can be done but is a PITA. Google around in the NG I mentioned, microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware, to capitalize on the experience of others.