Compatibility Issues

[ChaosTheory1]

Hi. I am currently in the making of building my third rig. I've never really had questions about compatibility up until now. The mobo I picked out is an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe. With a storage devices

PATA: 2 x ATA100 up to 4 Devices
SATA 3Gb/s: 4
SATA RAID: NV RAID 0/1/0+1/5 JBOD

I wanted to go with two Western Digital Raptor X 10krpm 150GB Serial ATA150 Hard Drive's. I've never had a 10,000 RPM hdd before, but I hear there is a significant difference between 10k and 7200. I am not sure if these components are compatible.

**Thanks to anyone who tells me if this hdd and my mobo are compatible or not.

 

[ghent123]

Well here is an article from Toms about the raptor 105.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/06/wd1500ad_raptor_xtends_performance_lead/

The main diff you'll notice is faster access times. If your a gamer you'll see your games load faster.
Never seen a MB have issues with a HD yet, well maybe some much older MB. But it all depends on windows to tell you the truth. Does windows support the controller that is on that board. The normal issue people run into is during installation of windows, where the Raid controller isn't preloaded with windows start-up installation. As long as you get a floppy disk with the drivers for windows on it you'll have no issues. You can easily get the drivers off the floppy disk and load them up. If you don't have a floppy drive on your computer your out of luck, unless you want to make a custom Windows installation CD/DVD.

Since that MB uses the Nforce4 raid controller you might have to use the drivers to actually let windows see the raid controller. Now I personally have never used a raid controller for this chipset so I might be wrong. But I have had friends that have and they have had issues trying to get windows installed without the drivers. I finally just made them a custom windows XP pro DVD that has all the Nforce drivers for there MB on it so they didn't need to worry about having to go out and buy a floppy drive just to install Windows XP. On a side note you have to have a floppy drive for you to install the drive during installation. Can't use CD-rom/DVD because of the way how MS did it. But on the other hand most MB manufactures have done some changes to the bios to allow Raid and SATA controllers to act like a normal IDE controller that windows can see properly during installation. Just have to play around with the bios and read the manual on how to do this. I would recommend download the manual from Asus web site and reading up on it before going ahead just to see what you can do and not do.

But down to your main question. The HD and MB are very compatible. It's windows that can be very iffy during installation. Once installation is done then it's a different story all together.