I need more storage! few questions about setting up something new..
 

I'm looking to buy a 200g drive. Currently i'm using up all the IDE slots on my board, 2 hard drives and 2 burners.

I'm using an asus p4p800 which supports raid and has SATA ports.

With the addition of the new drive, can I just hook up to a SATA port with the IDE left the same, or is it more complicated than that?

What would be the smartest way to setup my new drive? I've never tried sata or raid, but i'm willing to go for it if there's an improvement in performance.

I was in the same situation and bought a SATA drive. I just plugged in the drive, installed the drivers, formatted it and was set. Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Linux all recognize the drive.

I understand you need to do something special if you want to make it a boot drive.

ditto fo rme as well

basically plugged it in, had to turn on the sata driver in the bios (abit is7 mobo) and go into computer management to format the hd. this was on winxp pro

works great and nothing really special about it

I've got the P4P800 and with the IDE RAID options, you might just want to save the money and stress over SATA and setup a RAID 1 or JBOD to get more disks into the system, I've got 4 HD's, a CD-RW and a DVD-ROM hooked to mine at the moment.

Good grief that's a lot of freaking acronyms.