I tried to plug in a SATA notebook drive internally while XP was runing and it didn't detect the drive. I thought these drives and interfaces were plug and play. Why didn't it work?
Serious? Try THIS as a general guide. If the disc you are adding has an OS installed on it, you can format this from your original disc. (choose format-> drive name etc..) If you wish to boot from that HDD then you'll do so from the bios I believe. Also take a peek at this for cableing instructions. Cheers.
I probably wouldn't risk it with laptops, but the S-ATA interface is plug and play, as the S-ATA power plug is designed not to allow shorts and drives that use the interface have a delay before they spin up after receiving power. Don't forget a S-ATA data cable alone can't power the drive, it needs power as well.
Onya, I know cabling and all, I've built computers before. I just wanted to know, aren't you supposed to be able to plug it in internally like a flash drive and won't XP see it? After I did that on mine XP didn't see it but it saw it fine after a reboot. This means my hookup was fine but a problem with XP not recognizing the drive via Plug & Play.
It seems like I got the wrong end of the stick. Thanks to both, now I know (s-ata) a little better. Cheers.
I think it might depend on the controller, I've seen it work, and I've seen it not work, without an explicable reason.
I often have to pop into device manager and tell it to look for hardware before it finds the drive but it beats turning off and back on all the time having said that my son has killed a sata by pulling the power off at an angle so there is a slight risk everytime you do it
I never actually thought of that. That is a possibility but if you said that it fried one of your drives, I may just hibernate the PC, plug it in and power it back on. Basically the same as plug and play since your not rebooting the system, just suspending it, without the risk of shorting out a drive.
Through a poorly made cable, I've actually snapped the end off a S-ATA power cable once, did nothing to the drive. Then again that drive also survived a Qtec PSU meltdown...
Haha, Ironically that was the same drive that I was trying to Plug and Play. WD2500JS 250 GB WD OEM from a Dell Computer. My other Dell OEM drive is the JD one. Good drives. Did you adjust the AAM on the drive to max performance?
I haven't done a damn thing to the drive, just plug in and go. I have a pair, they used to be in RAID0 before I realised how pointless it was.
Edit the AAM on the drive using Hitachi HD Tools or something like that. By default it's set to the lowest which is quietest but lowest performance. You can select 0 to 254, whichever you need. You will see a huge increase in transfer rate over time.
The drives already make enough noise and sustain 70MB/s transfer rates locally. I'd always select the quietest setting on HDDs.
If yours is sustaining a 70MBPS transfer rate (Damn, that's good. How do you test it?) Then it's probably set at highest AAM.
