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IDE, SATA, SCSI Hard Disk Drives, SSD, CD/DVD and Blu-ray drives - Page 1Last updated on 12 May 2008
CONTENTS This section of the site consists of three pages. Click the relevant link to visit the following topics. - Use your browser's Back button to backtrack. Hard Disk Drives - This Page - Scroll down the page Floppy & Zip Disk Drives - Page 3 USB Flash Drives Click here! to go to information on this site on USB Flash Drives
An introduction to hard disk drivesInternal hard disk drives
Almost every modern desktop PC or laptop/notebook PC contains at least one internal hard disk drive (HDD) as the permanent mass storage device for its software. Some desktop and laptop PCs now use flash memory or a Solid State Drive (SSD) flash-memory drive instead of a hard disk drive, but they are currently exceptions to the rule because flash memory currently costs much more than hard-disk space. Flash memory is also used in solid-state drives (SSD) that can be used in desktop and laptop computers instead of conventional hard disk drives. An SSD drive uses much less power than a conventional hard drive, and it can withstand shocks (when a laptop is dropped, etc.), better than conventional hard drives. At the time of writing (May, 2008), the capacities of SSD drives have reached 128GB, although only 32GB SSD drives are currently inexpensive enough to make them a viable alternative to standard hard disk drives. In the near future, as the prices of flash memory and flash-memory devices reduces compared to the prices of current means of data storage, it is likely that all PCs for home use will use flash memory instead of RAM memory, and SSD drives instead of hard disk drives. Memoright SSDs: The End of Hard Drives? - "Memoright has achieved an important milestone with its flash SSD: the device’s performance is truly better than that of any competing hard drive." - http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-memoright,review-30808.html Memoright - http://www.memoright.cn/en/ Most desktop PCs currently use 3.5" hard disk drives. Most laptop PCs currently use the smaller 2.5" hard disk drives especially designed for use in mobile, portable computers. Visit the Desktop PCs section of this site for information on how to buy, build, repair, fix, and protect the various types of desktop PCs. Visit the Laptop/Notebook PCs section of this site for information on buying and protecting them, and fixing problems with them. When the computer is switched off, the software and data files, etc., remain recorded on the hard disk drive's magnetic platters, and can be accessed by the operating system the next time the computer is switched on. All modern PC motherboards have the capacity for at least four IDE ATA disk drives, which could be a mixture of hard disk drives and CD/DVD, or Zip drives and LS120/LS-240 super floppy disk drives, which can use the IDE bus. IDE ATA is outgoing technology. The current motherboards that support the latest serial ATA (SATA) standard usually provide connectors for six drives, which could be a mixture of SATA hard drives and optical CD/DVD drives. The operating system (DOS, Windows, Unix, Linux, OS X, etc.), and all of the application software (MS Office, Internet Explorer, etc.) is loaded by an installation program on a floppy disk or CD/DVD disk on to the drive's magnetic platters for retrieval by the operating system, which, of course, has to be instructed to do so by the computer's human operator via the computer's keyboard and mouse, the computer's processor, and its RAM memory. The RAM (volatile memory) cannot presently hold any data permanently, because it records the the bits of data (as the ones and zeros of the binary numerical system) as electric charges that disappear when the computer is switched off. If you want to know the technical details of how a hard disk drive works, click the following link and then use your browser's Back button to return to this page. - http://computer.howstuffworks.com/hard-disk.htm The best and most popular manufacturers of hard disk drives are Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor (now owned by Seagate), Fujitsu, Samsung, and Hitachi. IBM used to make hard disk drives but sold that part of its business to Hitachi. There are only three main standards used to interface internal hard disk drives, CD drives, etc. - the SCSI and IDE ATA standards (the IDE ATA standard is also called PATA, which stands for Parallel ATA) - which have been available for many years, plus the latest standard called serial ATA, usually abbreviated to SATA, which is available in two versions - SATA 150 (the first version) and SATA II 300. The IDE ATA standard is also known as Parallel ATA (PATA), because it makes use of a ribbon cable that has 40 conductors that transfer data in parallel, plus another 40 conductors that shield them from interference for PATA 66/100/133 drives. Round cables are also available for use with these drives. The Serial ATA (SATA) standard is compatible by design with the original IDE Parallel ATA (PATA) standard. In fact, they are so similar that accessory adapters are available that allow an existing PATA hard drive to plug into a PCI SATA controller card or the SATA connectors on a motherboard. External hard disk drivesIt is possible to buy hard disk drives (and other disk drives, such as floppy disk and CD/DVD drives) that connect to a desktop PC or a laptop PC externally via a USB, FireWire, or eSata connection. Click here! to go to the information on external hard drives on this site.
The faster, more expensive SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) drives and devices are often found employed in high performance PCs, but most often on non-PC platforms, such as Unix workstations and servers. The second-named standard, IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) ATA is much cheaper than SCSI and is still the most used of the three standards because it has been in use for over a decade. It has gained ground on the SCSI speeds of execution and data transfer. The third standard, serial ATA (SATA), potentially the fastest of them all, could transfer data as fast as 600MB/s now, but the current internal mechanisms of hard drives limit it to being not much faster than standard IDE ATA drives, which can only sustain about 60MB/s in practice. This situation was expected to be overcome by the SATA II 300 standard, but the drives that have become available that use it have not shown much of a performance increase over the earlier version of the standard (SATA 150), which, in turn didn't outperform the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) drives. SCSI technology had to adopt serial technology in order to keep ahead of the SATA II 300 standard, which has a theoretical data transfer speed of 300MB/sec compared to the 320MB/sec of the fastest parallel Ultra320 SCSI standard. The new serial SCSI standard is called Serial Attached SCSI (SAS). Click here! to go to the information on SCSI hard disk drives on Page 2.
Unfortunately, the IDE ATA standard has been given several confusing marketing names by the different concerns involved in the manufacture of IDE devices - E-IDE - ATA - Ultra ATA - DMA - UDMA - Ultra DMA. To add to the confusion, because serial ATA (SATA) drives are now available, the older IDE kind that uses a parallel interface is now also called Parallel ATA or PATA. So, if you see a reference to a PATA drive, it means an IDE ATA drive. See further down this page for information on serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drives. Luckily, all you need to remember to be able to distinguish between the IDE and SCSI standards is that SCSI drives are daisy-chained together with special cables, and are usually, but not always, attached to a PC via an add-on card installed in one of the motherboard's ISA or PCI slots. - An SCSI controller chip can also be found integrated on some PC motherboards, but this is the exception, not the rule. Both IDE ATA and SATA drives are usually attached directly to the motherboard by special ribbon cables. The type of IDE ATA ribbon cable shown in the image below on the left can accommodate two drives each. There is a second connector that connects to a drive in the middle of the cable. The ribbon cable shown in the image on the right is for a floppy disk drive. It has a twist in the conductors that is clearly visible at the end of the connector that must always be fitted to the floppy disk drive itself.
You can also purchase an add-on PCI card for an IDE ATA drive if you want to install more than the usual maximum of four drives - or if you want to use a higher mode of the standard not supported by the motherboard. Serial ATA (SATA) drives use thinner ribbon cables that can only accommodate a single drive. Look further down this page to see an image that compares the two types of ribbon cable. IDE ATA (PATA) hard drives require to be connected to the power supply unit by one of its standard four-pin Molex power cables. Some SATA hard drives can use a Molex connector, but more recent models can require to be connected to the power supply unit by the newer SATA power connector, which is thinner than a molex plug. However, if an older power supply unit doesn't have an SATA power connector, a converter cable can be purchased for about £4 from a vendor such as http://www.maplin.co.uk/. It plugs into a Molex plug. However, note that some new SATA drives require a +3.3V connection that old-style ATX 1.3 power supply units can't supply; they require to be connected to a new-style ATX12V 2.0 power supply unit. The user manual for a particular make and model of drive that can be obtained from its manufacturer's site should provide information on its power requirements. Further, illustrated information on SATA hard disk drives is provided further down this page.
Note that there are two types of IDE ribbon cable. The earlier type of cable is used on ATA HDD drives running ATA (UDMA) 33 and earlier ATA modes. This cable has 40 conductors in the ribbon. But HDDs using the ATA (UDMA) 66/100/133 modes of operation require the new cables that have 80 conductors in the ribbon, 40 of which are used to shield the others from electromagnetic interference. In fairly recent PCs, the connectors for the drives on an IDE cable are "keyed," which means that they are designed so that they can only fit into the sockets on the motherboard (or adapter card) in the correct way. If you try to plug a cable's connector in the wrong way, it won't fit. For more information on IDE cables visit these two sections of the PC Guide site. - Standard (40-Conductor) IDE/ATA Cables - http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_Cable.htm Ultra DMA (80-Conductor) IDE/ATA Cables - http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html Visit this article on how the Cable Select (CS) feature is used to configure IDE drives - http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_CS.htm. Never open a hard disk drive
Note that the Western Digital hard disk drive depicted above is shown with its top cover removed. You should never open a hard disk drive, because dust can irreparably damage or destroy it. These drives are assembled in a dust-free environment. The safest way to upgrade RAM: Use the UK and US Crucial Memory AdvisorsThe memory requirements of the versions of Windows VistaMost of the versions of Windows Vista require more RAM memory to run optimally on a computer that doesn't use memory-hungry applications than Windows XP. A video-editing application is an example of memory-intensive software. Only Windows Vista Home Basic has a recommended minimum amount of memory of 512MB, which is the same amount recommended for Windows XP. Windows Vista Home Premium, the most popular version, and Windows Vista Ultimate require a recommended minimum of 1GB (1024MB) of memory, which is twice the amount of minimum memory recommended to run Windows XP. For more information on computer memory, read the RAM pages of this site. Paul Mullen, the highly-respected computer guru of the Helpfile at ComputerShopper.co.uk - "I have recently been buying my memory only from Crucial Technology. I would rather pay the extra cost than waste time trying to track down the obscure program faults that bad memory can cause."
For example, if your computer has an Asus motherboard, open the menu, scroll down to ASUS, and click GO. If, say, you have a Dell computer, scroll down to DELL, and do likewise. You will be taken to the relevant information on Crucial's website. If you don't know the make and model of the motherboard installed in your computer, here is a good free utility - Belarc Advisor - that creates an analysis of the hardware and software on a personal computer. Look under FREE DOWNLOAD - http://www.belarc.com/. Another utility that also provides detailed information on the memory itself is CPU-Z. What to look for in an IDE/SATA/SCSI hard disk driveHere is how the specifications for some IDE/SATA/SCSI hard disk drives as they would appear in an informative advertisement.
MB stands for megabytes, which is approximately 1000 kilobytes (KB). With regard to hard disk drives, only their data cache is measured in MB. GB stands for gigabytes (1GB is approximately 1000MB), which is a measure of the data capacity of a hard disk drive, DVD discs, or RAM and flash memory. All current hard disk drives have their capacities measured in gigabytes. TB stands for terabytes, which is approximately a 1000GB. The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, listed in the table above, has a capacity of 1TB. DVD discs currently have their capacity measured in GB. RAM and flash memory is currently measured in MB and GB. RPM stands for the number of revolutions per minute that a magnetic platter inside a particular drive spins at. SATA stands for serial ATA - a drive that uses a serial ATA interface, the original version of which is SATA 150. The latest version of the standard is SATA II 300. Warranty. - You are advised to check for the warranty provided with a new HDD, as this can be for one, three, or five years, depending on the drive. Click the name in the Manufacturer column in the above table to visit the company's website. The 300GB DiamondMax Plus drive shown above has only 2MB of cache, a slow access time of 12.6ms, and runs at only 5,400RPM because it is designed primarily for its storage capacity for use on systems that do not require high performance accesses. Consequently, it stays cool and will probably last longer than a drive running at 7,200RPM. Note that an SCSI drive of the same capacity as an IDE drive costs many times more than the IDE drive. In January 2003, the 73GB Seagate Cheetah SCSI drive above costs £530/$880, while the 80GB Maxtor DiamondMax+ IDE drive costs only £105/$175. An SCSI drive with a capacity of only 9GB (the Quantum Atlas V) costs £120/$200. And the 146GB Hitachi Ultrastar SCSI drive shown in the table above costs £490 in November 2003, yet a 160GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 ATA 133 drive only costs £102. Moreover, IDE ATA and serial ATA (SATA) drives with a capacity of 300GBs are now available. SCSI drives have not reached the same high capacities as IDE drives, while the speeds of IDE drives are rapidly approaching the high data transfer speeds and access times of SCSI drives. The difference in speed is expected to be narrowed even further when serial ATA (SATA) drives reach their full potential. In October 2003, the Raptor WD360 250GB HDD from Western Digital was the only IDE ATA drive that runs at 10,000RPM. Is it likely that more 10,000RPM IDE drives will become available in the months or years to come? - Probably not until SCSI drives run faster than that, because manufacturers like Maxtor and Hitachi would not want to ruin their own business in fast SCSI hard drives by making comparably fast ATA hard drives available. It is now May 2006, and, so far, Western Digital is the only manufacturer of hard drives that run at 10,000RPM. The fastest IDE ATA drive currently available is the Western Digital Raptor X that spins its platters at 10,000RPM. The downside of using such a fast drive is the extra cost compared to standard 7,200RPM drives, and the extra noise they make. March 12, 2007. -
Cheap RAID Ravages WD Raptor: Is The Raptor Still The Ideal Hard Drive?
- http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/...review-2111.html In February 2003, for the price of five Ultra320 SCSI hard drives with a capacity of 147 GB, you can currently buy fifteen state-of-the-art IDE hard drives with a capacity of 200 GB. Because SCSI drives are used in mission-critical systems, they typically still come with five-year warranties, whereas most IDE drives now only have one-year warranties instead of the three-year warranties they used to have. It is now possible to obtain IDE drives with 8MB of cache (8192KB) compared to the previous maximum of 2MB (2048KB). SCSI drives are available with 4MB of cache. - The cache size is increasing as drive capacity is increasing remorselessly. Note well that HDDs with a high revs-per-minute rating (7200RPM+) get much hotter than drives with a lower rating (5400RPM). Therefore, be sure to install a drive with a high rating in its bay so that it has space around it. Do not cram it in between other drives. If you have odd problems with the system, consider buying and installing a cooling unit for such a drive. If you don't require fast drive access speeds, buy a drive with a 5400RPM rating. They are less expensive, and may well last longer.
Round IDE hard-drive cablesYou can also purchase round IDE cables. These can be used on any IDE ATA hard drive. Since they don't occupy as much space, they aid the cooling of the case, and, being easier to cover, they are more robust and hence less prone to be damaged. Single-drive cables that can accommodate a single drive instead of two drives are also available. The image below shows the individual cables that can accommodate two IDE drives. For some reason, they come in a wide variety of garish colours, such as in blue and red. The cables for the new Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives are so thin that it is not necessary to make them round.
Problems with the new round IDE cablesAnonymous post from the alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt newsgroup"Hi, I recently bought a set of CoolerMaster round IDE cables and I'm wondering if anyone has the same experience of the 45cm ones that I have. Trying to fit them on two drives close together is almost impossible without great force which didn't seem right to me. I spaced the drives apart and then only after cutting back some of the rubber shield would they bend enough to fit on the drives, if I had the drives right next to each other they just wont bend enough. The 60cm [cable] I bought for the DVD and CD burner doesn't have this problem. Also I managed to pull two of the tabs off when I needed to swap drives around. I certainly won't be buying anymore CoolerMaster cables in a hurry. I was going to buy the cheaper ones but decided on these as I thought they would be better, wish I'd have saved a few quid now." Connecting the drives to the motherboard and the power supply unit (PSU)Click here! to go directly to the Build a PC page on this site that deals with installing disk drives. Serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drivesA new type of ATA hard disk drive that uses serial data transfers is now the latest type of drive. Instead of an 40-conductor and 80-conductor ribbon, or rounded IDE cable (see the section below this one for information on round cables), a serial ATA (SATA) drive's cable only has seven conductors. The image directly below shows the difference between an 80-conductor IDE ATA ribbon cable (blue) and a SATA cable (red). The considerable reduction will help with the air circulation in the computer's case. Some optical CD/DVD drives are using Serial ATA now, so it won't be long before SATA replaces the IDE ATA standard for both hard and optical drives.
Note that the extra 40 conductors in an 80-conductor cable (compared to its predecessor, the 40-conductor cable) are only used as protection against electromagnetic radiation that can interfere with data transfers. The 80-conductor cables have to be used with drives running in PATA 66 and higher modes of operation. A conventional ATA IDE drive uses 40 wires for parallel transmission. The wide cable and plugs are cumbersome, and there are also a number of electrical limitations. SATA requires two pairs of high frequency cables working at a low voltage. The cables are compact and very easy to connect. Moreover, the connection limitations of parallel ATA, with its system of master and slave drives, is not longer applied to SATA drives. SATA uses a single cable per drive. You cannot attach more than one drive to a cable. You can attach any drive to any of the SATA connection points on the motherboard. While it is no longer necessary to configure the drive using jumpers, there may be a jumper setting that can reduce the capacity of the drive for motherboards that only support a certain size of drive. The image below shows cables used to connect an SATA hard disk drive to the motherboard.
The installation is simplicity itself - just attach the keyed serial cable to the drive and the motherboard, and attach a power connector from the computer's power-supply unit to the drive. The cable is keyed so that one end can only connect to the motherboard and the other end to the drive, so it can't be install the wrong way round. The image below shows the connection points on a motherboard for four SATA hard drives.
The cables for SATA drives are usually quite stiff and the standard connectors don't have any locking facility, so they can become loose and cause intermittent connection problems, such as having Windows failing to recognise a drive. Some hard drive manufacturers, such as Western Digital, use a proprietary SATA cable that locks to the drive. Western Digital calls its SATA cable SecureConnect. The end of the cable that connects to the drive has a special secure connector. Read the following guide to see a drawing of the cable. Click the title to read: How To Install and Troubleshoot Serial ATA (SATA) Hard Drive. If the motherboard has a mixture of IDE ATA and SATA drive connectors (ports), and you want to install both types of drive, consult the motherboard's manual to find out how to install a particular type of drive as the primary drive and as secondary drives. Note that it can be tricky connecting both IDE drives and SATA drives to the motherboard. If, say, you install a SATA drive and then install an IDE drive, unless the BIOS is programed to know the difference, the system will usually try to boot from an IDE drive first. If a BIOS update isn't available that allows the two types of drive on the motherboard to be installed so that the system can boot from the SATA drive, you'll have to buy a PCI SATA adapter card and set the BIOS as instructed in this Q&A: A problem with an old IDE hard drive and a new SATA drive running from a PCI SATA adapter card. If you are just connecting one or more SATA drives, each drive can be connected to each of the SATA connection points on the motherboard, or on a PCI SATA adapter card, because each drive has its own cable and is independently controlled by the SATA controller.
As with other serial standards such as USB and FireWire, SATA drives can be hotplugged and hot-unplugged. In other words, you should be able to connect and disconnect a drive while the computer is running. However, note well that inadequate support on the part of the manufacturer of the controller, or the hard disk drive itself may make implementing this feature problematic. As is the case with standard parallel ATA drives, PCI adapter cards for serial ATA drives (that are installed in the PCI slots on the motherboard) are available. Promise is the most well-known manufacturer of such adapter cards. If a time comes when a standard IDE ATA controller is not available on a new motherboard and you want to use its serial ATA port for a parallel IDE drive, you can use a special adapter to connect it to the Serial ATA controller. You connect the ribbon cable to an IDE connection point on the adapter, and then connect the adapter to the motherboard with a serial ATA cable. Such an adapter, called the RocketHead 100, is manufactured by HighPoint Technologies Inc. **** Windows XP: Installing the device drivers for a boot SATA driveSATA hard disk drives have only become available fairly recently, so Windows 98, 2000, and XP won't have the drivers for them. If you are installing an SATA drive on a system that already boots from an IDE ATA hard drive, you can obtain the driver file and point Windows to the file's location when Windows asks for it on the first boot after such a drive has been installed. But if you're installing a bare SATA drive on a new motherboard, then you have to do the following: 1. - Read the motherboard's manual, which can be downloaded from the motherboard's site if you don't have one. There will probably be a jumper that has to be enabled before the SATA controller can be used. The manual will tell you where to find the jumper on the motherboard and how to enable it. 2. - Download the SATA driver file from the motherboard's site. 3. - Copy the driver file to a floppy disk. With the SATA drive mounted in the case, connect the keyed SATA cable to the drive and the motherboard, connect a power cable from the power supply unit (PSU) to the back of the drive, and set the boot order in the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM and then SCSI. Motherboard manufacturers usually use the SCSI option in the boot order for SATA drives. The motherboard's manual will tell you what the boot order setting has to be. Install Windows XP. Windows will detect the new drive. Press the F6 key when Windows asks you to do so, and then allow Windows to install the SATA drivers from the floppy disk. You can now install Windows, which will allow you to partition/format the drive/drive partitions as required. Windows Vista: Installing the device drivers for a boot SATA driveUnlike with Windows XP, which requires a floppy disk containing the SATA device drivers to be used at system startup, if the BIOS setup program recognises an SATA hard disk drive as the boot drive, Windows Vista should be able to install its device drivers during its setup installation procedure. If Vista asks for the drivers, it allows the user to search through all of a computer's storage devices for them, including a USB flash drive, not just the floppy disk drive, as is the case with Windows XP.
Hard disk drive problems - SATA hard drivesThere are several Q&As that discuss installation and other problems to do with SATA hard drives on the Hard Disk Drive Problems pages on this site. Look on Page 1, Page 2, and Page 3. For example, How can I restore Windows XP to a serial ATA (SATA) hard disk drive? Here is another Q&A worth reading, because it deals with the SATA and RAID settings in the BIOS setup program: SATA device drivers for Windows 98 or Windows MeThis is advice I found with regard to an SATA drive in the motherboard manual for an AMD Socket 939 motherboard from MSI that runs Athlon 64 and 64 FX processors: "MSI Reminds You... 1. Please note that users cannot install OS, either WinME or Win98, in their SATA hard drives. Under these two OSs, SATA can only be used as an ordinary storage device..." This means that SATA drivers that can be transferred to a floppy disk, as described above for Windows XP, are not available for Windows 98 and Me. However, the boot IDE ATA hard disk drive will be able to access the SATA drive and allow files to be transferred to and from it, etc. In short, in order to use an SATA hard drive in a PC running Windows 98 or Windows Me, the motherboard manufacturer must make the drivers for those versions of Windows available. If it doesn't you can't run those versions of Windows from an SATA drive. If the motherboard manufacturer provides the drivers, and you are still having trouble using an SATA drive, you can find information of your own by entering a search, such as "windows 98" + sata + support (as is), in the Google box provided at the top of this page (with its Web radio button enabled). SATA II 300There are now two different versions of SATA. The original standard, also known as SATA I and SATA 150, supports a theoretical maximum data transfer speed of 150MB/s. SATA II, also known as SATA 300 and SATA 3GB/s, supports a maximum data transfer speed of 300MB/s. At present, the SATA 150 standard only provides a slight increase in performance over the earlier IDE PATA standard. The full performance benefit of having SATA was supposed to arrive with new SATA II 300 hard disk drives and motherboards, which are now available (July 2005). The theoretical data transfer rate is supposed to be double the rate of the original SATA 150 standard (3GB/s compared to 1.5GB/s), and there are other technological improvements, such as intelligent data access queuing that minimises the time required to find data on the a SATA II 300 drive's disk platter. However, the faster interface has still had little impact on drive performance, apparently because the mechanics of the drives are still not fast enough to make use of the extra bandwidth that the new standard can deliver. Note that SATA II 300 drives can be connected to a SATA 150 connector on a motherboard, and vice versa, but a SATA II 300 drive connected to a SATA 150 socket will run at the rate of a SATA 150 drive. However, note that some SATA II 300 drives, such as those made by Samsung, have to be set manually to SATA 150 mode by using a small jumper on the back of the drive before they can be connected to a SATA 150 socket on a motherboard. Whether or not this has to be done depends on the motherboard, so check in its user manual to make sure. If you don't have a user manual for your brand-name PC or a PC's motherboard, download a copy from its manufacturer's site. CD/DVD drives and SATANote that although SATA CD/DVD drives are becoming available, most CD/DVD drives still use the standard parallel IDE ATA interface. CD/DVD drives, being much slower to access, don't require a faster standard than IDE ATA, but, no doubt, they will soon be increasingly migrating over to SATA. New-style SATA power supply unitsPower connectors for SATA hard disk drives have become available on some PSUs, so no adapter cable is needed to power them. Some PSUs also even have a tachometer output for connection to the motherboard’s fan header. See the image of two SATA adapter cables below. The white plug fits into a power cable connector from the standard ATX PSU and the black plug fits into the SATA hard disk drive (or the optical SATA CD/DVD drives that are slowly becoming available). For the time being, SATA hard drives capable of using the new power cable will also have the standard four-pin power socket. However, a conversion cable will always be available so that an old-style PSU can be used with a new serial ATA hard drive. If an older power supply unit doesn't have an SATA power connector, a converter cable can be purchased for about £4 from a vendor such as http://www.maplin.co.uk/.
Note that the kind of SATA connector shown above does not provide a +3.3V connection, but some new SATA hard disk drives require this voltage. If so, only one of the new ATX12V 2.0 power supply units can provide it. If you have such a drive and an old-style power supply, you will have to buy a new-style power supply. You can download the user manual for any make and model of drive from its manufacturer's site. It will provide you with the power requirements of a particular model. ATX12V 2.0 is the new power supply standard that is going to replace the ATX 1.3 standard. The 3.3V SATA connector, shown in the image below, is available in straight and angled versions, and comes directly from the ATX12V 2.0 power supply unit so that a conversion cable of the kind shown above is not used.
Click here!to go to more information on the new ATX12V 2.0 PSU standard on the second of the three Motherboard pages on this site. Use your browser's Back button to return to this point on this page. Serial ATA: a site devoted to the new IDE drive standard - Serial ATA Adapters and Cables - a US site: http://www.xoxide.com/seataad.html Hard disk drive diagnostic and maintenance tools/utilities and tests
Note well that it is always sensible to make a backup of a hard disk drive that you suspect is failing (if you value its contents) before you run diagnostic tests, because the extra stress of the testing could kill the drive. How to run CHKDSK in Windows XP and Windows VistaIn Windows XP, open My Computer, right-click on the C: drive (or any other drive you want to check), and select Properties => Tools. Click Check Now under Error-checking. A Check Disk box opens. Select the Automatically fix file system errors option and the Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors if you have to or want to run that very long test. Otherwise leave that box unchecked. You click the dialog box's own Start button to run the disk-check tests. A dialog box warning you that Windows can't complete the tests until you reboot enquires if you want to postpone the test until that time. It says: "The disk check could not be performed because the disk check utility [chkdsk] needs exclusive access to some Windows files on the disk. These files can be accessed only by restarting Windows. Do you want to schedule the disk check to occur the next time you restart your computer." Click the Yes option and then repeat this process for any other hard disk drives or partitions in the system. You can then reboot when all the drives/partitions have been scheduled for a disk check when Windows restarts. Windows then checks each drive or partition to whatever level of thoroughness you selected, and repairs any correctable errors. In Windows Vista, click Start => Computer => right-click the drive that you want to check, and then in the menu that comes up click Properties => Tools => Error-checking. Click here! to go directly to more information on chkdsk on the Recovering Windows XP page on this site. Use your browser's Back button to return here. Read the section below to find out how to run the checks by using the chkdsk command from the command prompt.
ScanDisk in Windows 95/98/MeIn Windows 95/98/Me, run ScanDisk (under Start => Programs => Accessories => System Tools). You have a choice of the type of test to run. Select the Thorough test if you have problems with the drive that the Standard test doesn't fix with the Automatically fix errors box checked. The Thorough option can take a half an hour or more to run, depending on the size of the drive or partition. Windows should complete the tests without the need to reboot. Repeat this process for any other hard disk drives or partitions. If you can't run the Thorough tests from Windows, you can run the same tests from MS DOS in Windows 98. Restart the computer , press the F8 key after the system beep, and run the Command Prompt Only option. At the C:\> prompt enter the command ScanDisk /all /autofix /surface to to run the Thorough check and repair all the drives in the system. Omitting the /surface switch in the command runs a faster but less thorough check. Third-party hard drive diagnostic utilities and toolsMHDD is the most popular freeware program for low-level hard-disk-drive diagnostics. - http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/ You can find many other free hard-disk-drive utilities at http://hddguru.com/. Diagnostic utilities provided by hard disk drive manufacturersMost of the HDD manufacturers (Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, etc.) provide a diagnostic utility that can be used to diagnose problems with their drives from their websites. These utilities might also be able to partition and format a hard disk drive, which is a godsend if you're using Windows 95/98/Me with a drive(s) larger than 64GB, because the DOS FDISK utility has problems with drives of that size and larger - even if you're using the updated version. Click here! to read more about FDISK on this page. Use your browser's Back button to return here. Where to download the hard-disk-drive diagnostic utilities for a particular make of hard drive Seagate - SeaTools: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools Note that Maxtor and Quantum drives use SeaTools (above). Western Digital - Data Lifeguard: http://support.wdc.com/download/ Samsung - Choose Hutil or Shdiag: Hutil - http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_HUTIL.html Shdiag - DOS utility - http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/Support_Shd | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
