Maxtor S-ATA HDD not detected at cold boot!

Greg,

I really appreciate your help.  I was also wondering, is there an easy  way to make the SATA a primary drive without going through a headache or reformatting my original drive with all data, etc?

I wanted to make use of the faster speed on the SATA drive so that my whole system is a little faster as far as performance goes.

ALSO, how did you install the video editing software?  Do you have the software on the original drive and save data (video) on SATA or are both on SATA?  Does it matter?  I am using Pinnacle Studio v8 and have v9 that I will install soon.  I just want to take out anything that slows down the process of video editing and creation of DVDs.  Again, thanks a lot for your help!

Mansoor

 Hi Mansoor,

Well a couple options if you want to move your OS to the SATA drive.You could use Norton ghost to clone your current drive and place it on your SATA drive, although I have heard ghost has some problems with SATA drives.This may not be an issue anymore and I have not kept up on the subject as I have not had to do this (yet anyway).The other way would be to reformat your new drive as master and do a clean install of XP which is not a bad way to go other than the time for the reinstall. Either way you will have to reformat your original drive to clean it out for your Audio/Video drive.

 The numbers I have seen on the SATA drives are not that much faster than PATA drives.Theoretically they are faster but the real world numbers are not a huge difference and I don't know that you would notice it a whole lot in the OS or with your programs.

The main thing you want to avoid is having your OS or editing programs on the same physical drive as your audio and video,even if the drive is partitioned.What happens if they are on the same drive (even partitioned)is the computer tries to access the drive at the same time you are trying to stream video and this can lead to dropped frames or other program slowdowns.

 I currently have 3 drives,all three are Seagate 160 gig.The PATA drive is master with 2 partitions.C: Drive has the OS and any software directly related to system hardware:Modem,sound card etc.

D: Drive has my NLE Software; Adobe Premiere Pro,After Affects,Encore & Audition.I will also load any other software onto this drive.

H: Drive is my first SATA drive and is my Audio/Video drive and is one partition, the full 160 gig.That is pretty much all you want to have on this drive.It should be set as the scratch disk for Studio v8.You will load all of your raw footage to here and any music or audio tracks you want to use.

I: Drive is my Export drive. The second SATA drive.I also have a Matrox RTX100 Extreme pro video card that requires a dedicated hard drive for real time MPEG 2 output.Otherwise you really don't need the 3rd drive.

 I know people are running systems both ways without any problems, so it is just a matter of if you want to move your OS to the other drive and mess around with all that stuff.The main thing is to keep a clean path for for your video stream.The SATA drives are good for this because they don't share the port with another drive or CD or DVD drive like the PATA drives do.

If you are running at least a gig of ram and somewhere around a 3ghz p4 I don't think you will have any problems.I'm sure someone will have an argument as to why it should be one way or the other,but this is working pretty good for me right now.Personally I would try it like you have it now and see how it works.You can always change it later,and maybe save having to do it twice.

Greg

Greg,

Again, I appreciate your help.  I will take your advice and keep my original drive as is along with the Studio software. I will add the SATA and keep it for data for video only (whether it is input or output data- tell me IF i understood differently than what you intended).  Again, thanks!  I will let you know how this progresses for me.

Mansoor

Adam:

Start a new thread rather than add to a month-old thread that no one is reading.