On Sunday 03 February 2008, Timothy Murphy wrote:
Can I run a SATA disk with an ATA controller?
No, you'll need a card, and if the bios on that mobo doesn't see the sata disk by itself, the sata disk will not be able to be booted from.
One of my disks is about to die, and I've been looking for a large - say 500GB or larger - disk, and all the ones I see seem to be SATA.
Alternatively, is it reasonably easy to find and install a SATA controller in place of an ATA one?
Easy, but don't plan to boot from it. I've tried 2 such cards now, one that TigerDirect said would, but the mobo bios must have hooks, which apparently the latest bios for my Biostar board doesn't have. Here is the lspci -v on the card I'm using now, with a 400GB deathstar:
01:0a.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 01) Subsystem: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3512 SATARaid Controller Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 19 I/O ports at 9400 [size=8] I/O ports at 9800 [size=4] I/O ports at 9c00 [size=8] I/O ports at a000 [size=4] I/O ports at a400 [size=16] Memory at e6004000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=512] [virtual] Expansion ROM at 50000000 [disabled] [size=512K] Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 2 Kernel driver in use: sata_sil Kernel modules: sata_sil
Like you, I'm about to build another box WITH all this stuff. Bring $$$$.
-- Timothy Murphy e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366 s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland