SATA Devices126
A.1 SATA Guidelines
NOTE: These systems support a mixed configuration of SCSI and SATA hard drives. The HP xw4300 Workstation does 
not support IDE hard drives.
When installing and operating SATA devices:
• Connect the SATA hard drive from the system board to the hard drive with the SATA cable (326965-006).
• If using a SATA controller card, connect the 4-4 pin LED cable (included with SATA controller board) from the 
card header “JP1” (4-pin header) to the system board header labeled “HD LED” (4-pin header at P29).
For complete and current information on supported accessories and components, visit 
http://partsurfer.hp.com
.
A.2 SATA RAID Configurations
This workstation supports an embedded SATA RAID. Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID) combines multiple 
physical drives together to provide either increased performance or increased redundancy.
For an embedded SATA RAID, there are three primary configurations.
• RAID 0 is a striping configuration. For example, this combines two 80GB drives into one 160GB drive. Both 
physical drives can be accessed simultaneously for better performance. This is faster than using two 80GB drives 
separately.
• RAID 1 is a mirroring configuration. For example, this uses two 80GB drives, but one drive is a complete mirror 
of the other drive. The system remains functional and no data is lost if one of the drives should fail.
• RAID 0 + 1 is a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1. The controller combines the performance of data striping 
(RAID 0) and the fault tolerance of disk mirroring (RAID 1). Data is striped across multiple drives and duplicated 
on another set of drives.
• RAID 5 is data striping with rotating parity. For example, three 80GB drives offer 160GB of usable storage, with 
the third 80GB drive used to store parity information. Data can be fully recovered if any one of the three drives 
fail. 
There are other RAID configurations, but they are not supported on an embedded SATA RAID.
NOTE: For information on the integrated SATA RAID, visit http://www.hp.com/go/workstationsupport and review the 
supplier’s documentation and HP User Manual for the Integrated NVIDIA SATA RAID Array for Microsoft® Windows® 
XP Professional. For information on supported SATA RAID configurations, visit
 http://www.hp.com/go/productbulletin.