Most of the hard drives in use these days are SATA/SATA II. The SATA standard was adopted quite some time back. The advantages offered by the new SATA disks are many – greater speed & bandwidth, more reliability and hot-swapping.

Another advantage is that the SATA power & data cables are much smaller than the corresponding IDE cables and hence prevent unnecessary clutter in the cabinet maximising free air flow.

Additionally, there are no master-slave configuration or jumper settings required as in IDE drives.

To use SATA hard drives, you need:

1. A SATA enabled motherboard. (You can alternately use a PCI SATA Adapter)

2. A SATA hard drive. (duh?)

3. The SATA connectors that come bundled with the hard drive.

Installing a SATA hard drive is very similar to installing a IDE drive, actually easier.

Here are the steps you should follow –

1. Ground yourself properly before doing any computer hardware related work. Or, use an anti-static wrist strap, if possible, to prevent any electrostatic discharge.

2. Insert the SATA drive into the Drive Bay and screw it up tightly using a screw-driver.

3. Locate the SATA connector ports on the motherboard and insert one end of the SATA cable in that port. You may need to refer to your motherboard manual for more specific instructions as the locations vary with different motherboards.

4. Insert the other end of the SATA cable in the SATA hard drive.

5. Connect a SATA power cable to your hard drive. If there are no extra SATA power cables, use a MOLEX-to-SATA power adaptor.

6. Put everything back together, close your cabinet and reboot your computer. Your computer should recognize the SATA hard drive automatically.

Note: If you are installing Windows XP, you may need to disable AHCI in your BIOS settings to enable SATA IDE Emulation mode. You can access BIOS settings by pressing F2/Del at bootup, depending on your Motherboard. Refer to you motherboard manual for more details.
After booting into XP, you can install SATA drivers for Windows XP by Microsoft.