How to get SATA drives to work

[faun]

Hey ho, nearly xmas!
etc etc
as some of you may know ive had a buggerload of problems with my LaCie external HDD, which, slowly, was put down to a faulty drive controller. Having taken out the HDDs held within, ( 2 samsung 500GB HDDs ) ive attempted to get 1 of them working as an internal drive. Ive connected it to the power and sata cable, but when i boot i (perhaps obviously?) am not getting any connection whatsoever. is there something i need to do in bios or something to get it to work? what am i doing wrong? (because invariably i AM doing something wrong)

thanks to any and all who can help

 

[faun]

oh wait. i think ive sorted it. looking back through old threads ive found that simply going on start and "computer management" i can view my disks and partition/format the drive from there. GUH. waste of thread. so sorry.


thanks to ian for giving me that info in the past, and apologies for those who wasted their times reading this thread! close/lock/kill

 

[Veedaz]

Hi faun

Just looking at your wish list ... what HDs are you thinking of getting ? SSD are very good.

 

[faun]

Hi faun

Just looking at your wish list ... what HDs are you thinking of getting ? SSD are very good.

hey
erm i wasnt really thinking of any HDD upgrades...arent SSDs still limited by their relatively small size though?

 

[Veedaz]

Well its best to have just the OS on SSD and Windows 7 is optimised for SSD, then any storage on mechanical drives, there are 256GB SSDs available from Corsair to name one make.

Two hours ago i installed a SSD to a customers desktop cloned Windows 7 over to it and now Windows 7 is operating much faster .

 

[faun]

Well its best to have just the OS on SSD and Windows 7 is optimised for SSD, then any storage on mechanical drives, there are 256GB SSDs available from Corsair to name one make.

Two hours ago i installed a SSD to a customers desktop cloned Windows 7 over to it and now Windows 7 is operating much faster .

ooooooooooooooooh. i might have to look into this. i have the 2 500GB drives ofc, and my primary is a rather old 320GB samsung HDD aswell lol. how much of a difference does the SSD make on the running of W7?

 

[Veedaz]

Speed is the main thing you will notice faun Windows loads a lot faster and applications open very fast, small apps are instant and large apps like MS Office load in a blink. You don't defragment a SSD but Diskeeper 2010 has an option of Hyper Fast, Im using it now >

New HyperFast technology from Diskeeper Corporation is the first ever optimizer exclusively designed for faster performance and extended lifespan of Solid State Drives running on Microsoft® operating systems. It is nothing short of a "must have" for all the new SSD laptops or "netbooks" that have entered the mobile computing market.
Taking SSD technology beyond the barriers
Solid State Drives (SSD) promise to deliver cutting edge speed. But most PC operating systems are not designed to exploit the SSD potential. Because of this, drive performance degrades dramatically over time and increased I/O traffic significantly shortens the drive’s life expectancy.
HyperFast creates and maintains optimized free space, increasing the controller’s ability to write sequentially and thereby enormously increasing the peak speed and life of the SSD.
HyperFast operation requires no scheduling or maintenance thanks to the Diskeeper Corporation proprietary InvisiTasking® processing technology. InvisiTasking employs only unused system resources to operate with zero overhead on the system, therefore transparently increasing the speed, performance and reliability of the SSD.
The Proof
To demonstrate this fact, benchmark tests were performed (Figure 1) on an 8GB SSD in a simulated real world scenario to depict a customer’s environment over 6 months. With HyperFast SSD optimization enabled, performance gains were automatically realized with 5.9x faster reads, 19.5x faster writes, 3.9X faster random reads and 9.0X faster random writes (higher numbers indicate higher performance).

Hyper Fast working

 

[faun]

Holy S***.
*starts search for SSD....*

uhm, you wouldnt be able to point in the direction of any well priced/highly reccomended brands for SSDs would you? haha thanks

 

[Veedaz]

Hi faun

Here are some at quite a good price > http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/Components/HardDrives-Internal/SolidState/

And Diskeeper you can download a 30 day trial with Hyper Fast full working > http://www.diskeeper.com/trialware/trialwareproducts.aspx

 

[faun]

THanks.
Interestingly, Ive come across a thread written by thrax on his site Icrontic, about SSDs and their performance, and in particular a feature called "ATA TRIM".
Take a look here:
http://icrontic.com/forum/showpost.php?p=718418&postcount=1

 

[clifford_cooley]

Ive come across a thread written by thrax on his site Icrontic, about SSDs and their performance, and in particular a feature called "ATA TRIM".

Exellent artical too.

And he continues to update the drive list of manufacturers that are using "ATA TRIM" with there SSD's. I would recommend only buying an SSD that supports ATA TRIM.

 

[Veedaz]

Clifford wrote

I would recommend only buying an SSD that supports ATA TRIM

Second them wise words and more on TRIM here > http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx