Oolite Bulletins

My nforce2 based mobo has two SATA ports on board and I thought considering that they're cheaper and offer better performance I should buy one to replace my ageing 80GB PATA drive (dual boot Ubuntu 7.10 and XPSP2).

I want to do this before going for a new version of Ubuntu (9.04) and a clean install of XPSP3 as a dual boot.

However, I recall that there are all sorts of issues about getting PCs under either XP or Ubuntu to boot from and therefore install on a clean new SATA drive.

Anybody out there confirm deny or offer any advice?

TIA

I've got PATA and SATA drives on two motherboards of the same make & model. (Two different systems, same motherboards, one has a PATA hard drive and the other uses two SATA drives in RAID-0 configuration.)

While I'm running WindowsXP instead of Ubuntu, I can say that in my experience there hasn't been a noticeable difference in drive performance.

So replacing your drive just on a whim doesn't make sense to me.

But, when building a new computer system, it makes sense to install SATA drives for a couple of reasons.

~Firstly, because many motherboards don't have more than one PATA connection these days. So, you'd be limited to a total of two PATA drives on one cable. This isn't enough for most users. Utilizing the SATA connections available on newer motherboards makes sense.

~Secondly, because the SATA drive throughput specifications are faster (although, in real world usage the difference may be dependent upon the other components of the whole computer system).

Edited to add: Another good place to ask computer questions is on http://www.motherboards.org

DaddyHoggy wrote:

However, I recall that there are all sorts of issues about getting PCs under either XP or Ubuntu to boot from and therefore install on a clean new SATA drive.

I've got a machine with XP and SATA disks only. There only is one simple problem concerning those: XP doesn't (always? maybe for some boards it has drivers?) come with the necessary drivers, thus it cannot install to those SATA drives unless you've got a floppy disc with that driver. If you have, everything is fine.

Typically, the motherboard vendors ship a CD which can create a floppy disc with the necessary drivers. That's the next part of the problem: You need a working machine in order to create the driver disc before you can install XP.

Once done, everything was fine.

As a result, I can see potential problems if your board/machine is new and thus doesn't even have a stone-age floppy disc.

Screet