NEWSVAGANZA: SATA Harddisk Installation

SATA Harddisk Installation

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Installing SATA HDD is indeed easier than IDE hard drive. We will not be bothered again with welknown wide ribbon cable and the "big" IDE socket fixed on the motherboard which even hampered us to insert the cable into the IDE harddisk connector. SATA power and data cable on the other hand have grid array connector which has nearly zero insert force instead of pin array of IDE power and data cable connectors. Only, one thing that we should consider when choosing the cables with a clip fixed on the connector of the cable.

Compared with the firm of the pin array of the IDE cables, SATA connectors have big possiblity to bounce which will cause failure to be detected by the bios or operating system in turn. The clips will support the connector to be at its place firmly. It happened when I for the first time installed this drive to replace one of IDE drives already installed on my PC. First I had used the red one shown below, with a clip on one connector and none on the other. My Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD not detected. I had also changed the insertion between the two connectors, from inserted on motherboard to HDD and vise versa. Still not detected. When I finally replace with the yellow one, directly detected.

SATA Data Cable With One Clip

SATA Data Cable With Clip On Each Connector

SATA Power Cable (Converter)

SATA drive doesn't need jumper in normal installation, though there is jumper block found. This jumper will only needed when host controller adapter of motherboard doesn't support the data transfer speed autonegotiation. In this case set the jumper to limit the transfer rate to become 1.5 Gbits/second from 3.0 Gbits/second. If you never receive "drive not detected" error message by operating system, no need to set the jumper. There is no master or slave term. Each SATA drive is design to be 'master'. Again no jumper needed either in this case. Your harddisk will be recognized by BIOS as S-ATA1, S-ATA2 ... etc. If you have both IDE and SATA installed in your system, your IDE harddisk will still recognized as master or slave and primary or secondary harddisk depends on the socket connection and the jumper. In default booting will still be taken over by IDE harddisk if there is operating system installed in it. If you want to boot from SATA harddisk then you can change the boot setting in the BIOS. See the picture below.