I just bought a Maxtor SATA hard drive from Staples. It is $80. including tax. This is 100GB Diamondmax 10 hard disk.
The only thing I don’t like is it is only 1 year warranty. Open the box, there are a SATA interface cable, 4 mounting screws, a MaxBlast CD, a Menu and the hard disk.
I install it on my K8V-X motherboard whose chipset is VIA K8T800 and VIA VT8237. VT8237 supports SATA upto 150MB/second data transfer rate.
It is a brand new install with Win XP.
First of all, enable the SATA support in the BIOS setting.
Advanced >> Onboard Devices Configuration >> OnChip SATA Boot ROM [Enabled].
Secondly, boot from the MaxBlast CD. I chose “New Windows 2000 or XP System”, then made a partition about 25GB with NTFS format.
Thirdly, download the VIA driver for SATA. Download file. Unzip it and copy them into a floppy disk.
Now boot the system from my Windows XP installation CD. When prompted to install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver. press the F^ key then S when prompted, to specify additional devicces.
Insert the SATA driver floppy which I made in step three. Press enter.
Then follow the on-screen prompts to finish installing Windows.
The windows xp installation cannot continue without the SATA driver floppy disk. It cannot find the SATA hard disk.
When finishing the installation, I install the full VIA driver pack and SP2.
It is good to try a new type of harddisk.
