loonyblog.

One step forward, two steps back.

Thanks to the obscene install sizes of games like Doom 3 and The Sims 2 (not to mention my ever-accumulating collection of Morrowind add-ons), the primary hard drive on my game PC filled up last week. Since it's going to be a while before I'm able to take the plunge into the New, Hot Technology that is PCI-X, I figured this was as good an excuse as any to check out the other New, Hot Technology of the moment -- Serial ATA.

My motherboard's been capable of Serial ATA since I first installed it, but the price of SATA drives has only recently dropped as rock bottom as comparable IDE drives. Anyway, one of SATA's big draws is its relative simplicity when compared to the ancient, clunky IDE interface, so I was definitely looking forward to giving it a whirl.

So this evening I did just that. My 80 GB SATA drive arrived from NewEgg this afternoon, and I figured, you know, it would be a total snap to install. Naturally, this wasn't the case (are hardware upgrades ever as easy as they're supposed to be?). While I didn't wind up with smoking hardware or anything like that (yes, that's really happened to me), but I did have to deal with an old nemesis...IDE master/slave settings.

Anyone who's built a computer has almost certainly had to deal with IDE channel settings once or twice (or twenty, depending on how many PCs you've built over the years). For the unaware, each drive on a computer that's connected via the IDE port has to be assigned a channel and then a drive relationship (either master or slave) within that channel. Which sounds simple enough, except it's not...it can be quite a headache. See, IDE cables have three plugs on them -- one for the motherboard, one for the master and one for the slave. And each IDE drive has jumpers that have to be set for either master, slave or cable select. Which means you have to have each drive with the correct jumpers on the correct part of the cable on the correct channel in order to get it to work at all.

That's probably confusing anyone who doesn't know exactly what I'm talking about, but anyway, it's a real headache. Especially since it tends to be seriously buggy when combined with BIOS settings and the like. Some drives simply will not work as a slave at all, or at least, they won't work as a slave to certain drives, but they will to others. Anyway, this sort of thing is exactly why Serial ATA exists. There's no jumpers, the cables are downright tiny when compared to those clunky old IDE cables (oy how I hate snaking those around systems), and there are no master/slave connections whatsoever. Thank god.

Okay, so what went wrong tonight? Apparently my motherboard's SATA connection works as the primary IDE channel. Which meant I had to move my other drives to the secondary. Which sparked the usual bit of IDE craziness, as my hard drive and DVD-ROM briefly refused to do much of anything.

But eventually I got it all working right, and went through the unnecessarily complicated process for adding a new hard drive in Windows XP (why is adding a partition so strangely difficult?). And once it's done formatting in about 12 hours or so (okay, slight exaggeration), I can start filling this one up with games. Whee!

I guess I should be thankful for one thing...I haven't had to deal with IRQ settings (*shudder*) in years.

Posted by jason at October 6, 2004 10:08 PM | TrackBack | Read more: Geek Culture