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chzlchp
10-04-2008, 05:13 PM
I am in the throes of cobbling together a new computer. It appears that my beloved Abit motherboards are on life support (at best), so I've been looking at ASUS.

It appears to me that most of the ASUS boards only offer a single harddrive/CD connection (SATA). Am I correct here, or am I missing something obvious? And, if that is the case, what is the workaround?

How would one connect a coupla harddrives and a DVD/CD player, let alone one of each?

chzlchp
10-04-2008, 05:49 PM
Appears I may have answered my own questions, with a little more googling. :rolleyes:

Apparently, I am confusing PATA (the old--first flat, then [cool friendly] round--40-pin cables) with the newer technology of SATA.

So, my question becomes this (since I also noticed that my dream mobo has six SATA connections: Do I have to watch (when choosing) harddrives/DVD players, that I have the proper connectors, or are adaptive crossover connections a standard?

The Wise Monkey
10-05-2008, 02:09 PM
It doesn't really matter, to be honest. I would recommend SATA connections for everything because the SATA cables are smaller and so create less clutter in your case. You can mix and match IDE and SATA, but there are no adapters between the two afaik.

pastol
10-17-2008, 03:31 PM
Hey guys, I just logged on to this forum for the first time in a LONG time to try to find some info and happened to see this thread. Wise Monkey is, as always from what I can tell, correct. But there is one consideration that I found (the hard way) with my Asus P5K Pro. It may be obvious to everyone else, but after reading the manual for this MB, turns out it was nothing like what I thought. Mine has the 6 sata slots, as seen below.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y125/pastol/p5kpro_mb13.jpg
(mine are red, not orange)

What I didn’t know was that the black ones should be used for your CD/DVD drives. That was completely different than my understanding after reading the manual. I was having some weird results when I connected things the way I interrupted the manual, ran across the above info via Googling, and wa-la! Everything worked as expected when I connected my DVD drives into the black slots and my HDD’s into the orange/red ones.