Whirlpool

Hey guys,

I just bought a sata2 500gb hard drive and I want to install it myself, I have a gigabyte p35-ds3 motherboard and it has 6 sata connections 4 are yellow and 2 are purple, are the purple connections sata 2 or sata 1? The 4 yellow sata 2 ports are used up at the moment by my dvd writer / current hdd and 2 e sata ports on a pci slot.

I currently have a single 320gb hard drive running vista x64 ultimate and I was wondering what I should do with this new drive? Should I format the drive before I start using it? And if so how should I format it? I used to format my hdd using dban on my laptop which had a floppy drive but my new computer doesn't so I am kind of confused as to how I should format my new drive.

The drive will mainly be for storage / back up so I was just wondering how I should install it?

I was thinking that I connect the sata 2 cable to the purple sata slot on the motherboard, connect the sata power cable ( I can't see any of these around apart from two that are on the same line as the sata power cable connected to my hard drive and my cd drive, do I just plug the sata power cable into this harness?)

Turn on the computer, get into windows vista and it should be listed there in my computer ready to be used correct?

The drive I bought is a western digital WD5000AAKS, will this already be using the NTFS system? Or after I format it, if I should do so, will I need to select ntfs somewhere?

Thanks any help is appreciated.

Here's just one Google hit on how to format a hard drive: (you can do it in Windows, don't need DBAN or anything like that)
www.ehow.com/how_6026_fo...-hard-drive.html

The deal with the coloured slots is that there are two SATA controllers on the mobo (all are SATAII btw). The yellow ones are the Intel controller, and the Purple ones the JMicron controller (called "Gigabyte SATAII on like the product pages, manual, etc.). The JMicron controller is very crap compared to the Intel for things like RAID and ACHI, but for normal regular single drive use, you'll be fine just plugging your new drive into there.

the purple ports are just on a different sata controller...all the ports work the same

DrMatthias writes...

Turn on the computer, get into windows vista and it should be listed there in my computer ready to be used correct?

a new hdd won't show in my computer

you need to go to disk management...
fastest way is start > right click computer > manage > disk management.
then you can partition/format/assign drive letter and then the drive will appear in my computer
edit: since you are using vista you can probably open the start menu and type 'disk management' and press enter :D

The drive I bought is a western digital WD5000AAKS, will this already be using the NTFS system? Or after I format it, if I should do so, will I need to select ntfs somewhere?

just follow the instructions in disk management...it's easy