My Hard Drive arrived today, however I need help installing

[Frank M]

Hello, I received my hard drive today in the mail, unfortunately I don't know how to put it in.

Its a Western Digital Serial ATA Hard Drive.

Does anyone know how to put it in and what shall I need to put it in?

I don't have an ATA interface, so would I need an ATA Host adapter?

[Zemus]

Serial ATA harddrives need a serial ATA controller. BTW, ATA is just a regular IDE-controller which all motherboards come with.
You have to see if your motherboard has a serial ATA controller. If it doesn't, you need one that can be bought in the form of a PCI card.

The serial ATA controller, works like a regular IDE controller, but sends data serialized instead of paralell. Because of that, serial ATA uses smaller cables that take less space. Its theoretical speed is also higher than regular IDE.

[Frank M]

So, basically I need something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=15-150-015&depa=0&manufactory=BROWSE

[Zemus]

Yeah. The card will come with a floppy disk (most probably) with the drivers incase you wanna install Windows on it.

[Frank M]

Are there dos drivers for this as well?

[Zemus]

Well, I haven't tried, but I doubt it'll be accessible in DOS. I had a motherboard with a serial ATA controller, and it only came with Windows drivers.

[Danny]

You can also get a SATA to PATA converter, I use two of those since my RAID controller is SATA, but I only have PATA HDs.  That's Parallel ATA if you don't know, which is the standard IDE.

[Zemus]

Why should he use that? His new HD is SATA

[Frank M]

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=305320&pfp=SEARCH


Would that do?

I need a quick response.

[Zemus]

No, that's a paralell ATA controller. Serial ATA runs at 150 and it's usually mentioned explicitly that it's a serial ATA card.

[Frank M]

Oh wait, nevermind I found what I need.
Now, I have another question, is it safe (or close to safe) to use the drive without it being in the direction of the fan?

I put the drive at the top of the case where there is another drive bay.


EDIT: I just found out it isn't safe (duh!), is there a way to cool the drive down without me getting a new computer case then?

[Zemus]

The drive has to be cooled? Hmm, I don't know then. I have never encountered a harddrive that needs to be cooled down to work. Though it is an advantage if you got a lot of stuff in your cabinet.

[Frank M]

Okay, is there a way I could put the hard drive in my 5 1/2" drive bay and use some sort of 5 1/2" to 3 1/2" inch bay?

[Laust]

Yes, you can buy brackets to do that. Any computer store would probably carry those.

[Frank M]

YESSS! I got the drive working, apparently it does fit in the floppy disk drive bay. Anyhow I used Fdisk to create a partition, then I formatted it.

[Frank M]

And on a related note, it does work in MSDos mode.