Running Win 7 Ultimate on Intel dx58so MB with i7 965 @3.20GHz. MB has 6 SATA 2 plug-ins and I have two hard drives installed with dual boot capability to Win 7. I'm pretty sure that there is an Optical drive plugged into another one of the SATA ports, just haven't traced it back yet as the video card is blocking the port. Just bought a new OCZ Vertex 3 SATA 3 drive that I want to use as my primary drive. 1. Can I just add this SSD to an open SATA port (I know it will only run at SATA 2 speed), or is there a limit to how many drives Win 7 will support? 2. Anyone know of PCI Express x4 SATA 3 controller card that I can upgrade my SATA with? I read that an x1 card slows the SSD drive down worse than just using it in a SATA 2 port. 3. Anyone know of any "Gotchas" I should look out for setting up or using this drive? Thanks for any help I can get.
Hello again acrsn. Thanks for the help. I had planned on keeping one drive for dual booting to Win 7 just in case the SSD goes south for some reason. The other will just be used for storage and the SSD will have a clean Win 7 install. I plan to keep only a few programs on the SSD to keep fragmenting to a minimum. As far as AHCI goes, I had to Google that and I still don't know much about it. Not sure how to tell if I have it enabled or not...need to some digging on that one. Do I need it to run the setup I have planned?
AHCI is enabled in BIOS and should be there. There should be 3 modes: IDE/AHCI/RAID in system config or something in your BIOS. Just look around. There is also a windows registry entry which enables AHCI. Just google it. However, it is best done in BIOS.