2 sata drives NOT in raid?

Can I run 2 sata drives and have them not running in a raid?

The reason I ask this is because I want to get a single 74GB Raptor for playing games and running Photoshop. However, I already have an 80GB samsung sata drive that I'd rather not trash, and I don't want to run them in a raid because, well, I'm guessing that the 7200RPM samsung would bottleneck the Raptor.

Thanks

That should be no problem. You most definitely can run them as seperate non-RAID HDD's. You may not face a bottleneck (I am not very sure about this) if they drives were on 2 different controllers. For example, my A8V has both the VIA and Promise controllers.

Yes, you can't run those drives in raid, but they are fine alone.

Thanks for the quick responses.

Sry to semi-highjack the thread. But how are SATA drives labeled? Like when i get my 74 gb raptor and my 200 gb SATA storage. When i go to install xp will i see both? As in C is my 74 and D as my 200?

That depends on the BIOS. In mine, I can't see them under the detected devices like the IDE Drives, but I can see them when I look at Boot Devices or try to set Boot Priority.

what I would is install windows with the raptor connected only... and put on the 1st plug of your SATA controller (on the motherboard it should say something like SATA0 then SATA1 - put the raptor on SATA0). Run the install, and then restart the machine.

Connect your second drive and everything should be all hunky dory... format it through disk management... and boom! Instant storage that will probably be on drive E:... of course, you can change which letter the drive is in disk management...

Also, before I forget... make sure you have SP2 installed before you connect the 2nd hard drive so that windows can recognize the full 200 Gigabytes...