Ray, I've been doing my own computer building fo years but haven't had any experience with SATA hard drives. I have one 500 GB SATA Western Digital hard drive and all the cables. My question is "Can I hook up a single SATA drive or do they HAVE to be hooked up in pairs?? If they can be, how do I do it?? Thanks!!

I don't know, but from everything that i read you should be able to hook up a single one.

Thanks Ray, I'll have to do some more research.

Yes, you can hook up a single SATA HD. You only need multiple drives if you are planning on running some sort of RAID.
Hooking them up is as simple as hooking up any HD. You connect the data cable to a SATA connection on the motherboard and a power cable from the power supply.
The difference shows up when you install Windows. You need a floppy holding the chipset drivers for the chipset that controls the SATA connections on the motherboard. The Windows installation program will ask for it, early during the install.

THanks dlwolffo, just got home and will try it tomorrow. Also saw your other entry concerning http://www.tomshardware,com/2005/09/27/round. Will check thst out too.

They definitely can be used singlely.  However, on many motherboards the SATA controller is also a RAID controller.  Thus, it may be necessary to create a raid "array" containing just one disk, before attempting to acces that disk, such as to install Windows XP.  This is handled towards the end of the POST (power on self-test) when a message something like "press CTRL-F" to access Fasttrack controller appears.  (Note that CRTL-F and Fasttrack are probably specific to my motherboard.)  Some motherboards may do this automatically, if they sense only one hard drive.  Others may hvae an option that sounds soemthing like "just a bunch of disks", or JBOD.

As for the 500 GB size, to use that you will need XP with SP-2 (or Vista, or a modern LINUX).  That is too big for the originbal XP, 98, etc.

And, it is likely that you will need to hit F6 early in the installation (if XP) and have the SATA drivers available on a floppy.  Yes, a floppy, not a CD.  Be sure to copy everything from the manufacturer's CD (or download) to the floppy, including a file something like TXTSETUP.OEM".  For my ASUS motherboard this was essential to getting XP to acept the drivers.

WOW, thanks rharris270, that sounds like ANYTHING but simple. Yes, I'm using XP Pro SP-2 and an ASUS motherboard with an AMD dual processor 32/64 bit CPU. Like I said, I've been doing my own computer stuff for 15 years but have never ventured into the SATA/RAID part. A friend told me by E-Mail that the disk needs to be formated but how can you format the disk if the computer doesn't see it?? LOL I even tried re-installing XP with the SATA drive attached but when setup is done, it reboots and then starts setup all over agan, An endless cycle!! I just put the XP disk into my wife's computer (I'm using it right now) and couldn't find the SATA drivers. It's embarrasing, I couldn't even find ANY of the drivers. Never had that problem before. If you don't mind, would you PLEASE tell me which folder I'm looking for and what files I'm looking for? Or can I download them from Microsoft's website??  Thanks for the info!!

You get the SATA chipset drivers from the manufacturers website. I have an Intel chipset, they already have an .exe program to download that makes the required floppy disk for you.
Once those drivers are included in the install, you can choose [in the BIOS] to treat the hard drive just like an EIDE hard drive if you don't want to use RAID.

No wonder I couldn't find them on the XP CD. Thanks!!!