How Many SATA?

[Gunter]

Ive already got 2 SATA 120Gb, thinking of buying another 250Gb, but I dont want to buy it then have it not work, my motherboard is Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe, Version 1010 of the BIOS.

Sig for more info.

 

[E4g1e]

Your Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard has only two SATA ports, due to its Silicon Image Si3112A chipset. And current SATA implementations permit only one drive per port. Thus, your motherboard can only accomodate two SATA drives at a time.

 

[Ice Czar]

natively

there are of course add on SATA controller cards with various numbers of ports
and or RAID Controllers

 

[Gunter]

I know about Controller Cards, I just didnt want to pay the extra money to buy a Controller Card when I had an extra IDE Port.

 

[ameoba]

If you plan on getting a driver larger than 120GB and sticking it on a parallel ATA port, make sure the mobo supports ATA133...

 

[Snugglebear]

ATA133 isn't a requirement. There are many devices and controllers that support the larger addressing scheme with just ATA100.

 

[E4g1e]

If you plan on getting a driver larger than 120GB and sticking it on a parallel ATA port, make sure the mobo supports ATA133...

Not quite true. Although motherboards with ATA133 support already have 48-bit LBA support for hard drives larger than 137GB, most (though not all) motherboards with *only* ATA100 support either already support 48-bit LBA or can be updated (by updating to the latest motherboard BIOS version) to support 48-bit LBA. And even with such support, you'll still need 48-bit LBA support at the OS level (Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or later, Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or later and recent builds of the Linux kernel support 48-bit LBA).