SATA drive advice?

[stpvoice]

Hello all,

I am building a new computer, and am not planning to use IDE, in any way, shape or form. I will have a card reader and a floppy drive but thats about it, along with 2 SATA optical drives, and an SATA hard drive.

I have heard rumours that people have (recently) been having trouble installing an operating system on the HDD, becase the optical drive(s) are not being recognised, and are un usable. Is it a simple case of using the floppy drive to load drivers, or is there more to it, or does it just work?

I would like to hear if anyone had this problem, and how they solved it.

Thanks.

[ichwar]

Rumors about people recently are very vague. What optical drives were these "people" using, and what do you plan to use? In my experience, sata optical drives work just fine.
One thing to note, if you plan to install windows, you'll more likely than not have to disable plug and play in the bios before windows will install.
But yeah, sata optical drives are not the problem unless you buy one of the $20 drives.

[stpvoice]

sorry for the vagueness. Basiclly, its just some people have reported not having a SATA DVD-RW drive recognised by the motherboard. How would I go about disabling this 'plug and play?'

[Smith6612]

If you're installing Windows XP, yes you will have some trouble at first with the SATA drives as XP wasn't designed around the time of SATA drives being out and in majority of PCs (yes, funny thinking back to then when all you had were IDE/PATA drives. Gosh are those slow compared to today). If you use Vista or Windows 7 though, you should be fine in terms of drivers. That's all. If you do want to install Windows XP for whatever reason, at the blue setup screen as Windows is starting itself, it'll ask you to press F8 if you wish to install a 3rd party driver. Do this if you need a SATA driver.

Also the disable plug and play option is found in your BIOS Setup utility, which can be loaded on the PC at POST using F2, F1 or Delete (typically is delete). You shouldn't need to touch anything in the BIOS.