Maximum number of internal harddrives plugged into one mother board

[binaryman]

I have not seen this question addressed, so I hope it is not because my google and site search just missed it.  Maybe this is such a wrong question that no one would think to ask it.  Well, here is the question:  I have 4 sata Seagate hard drives plugged into 4 sata ports on the mother board.  My computer is setup as 32 bit.  No more than two of the drives will install on the computer.  I do not want a RAID setup.  Is this impossible, or is there something that I doing wrong?  I thought sata was supposed to be able to hook up more than 2 hard drives on a mother board.  Is this only if done in RAID setup?  Any help would be appreciated.  Here are my specs:

WinXP  SP3
Motherboard Model         970A-UD3    VER 1.1   -   Gigabyte Brand
Bios  V6.00PG
 32 bit
Power  Supply Unit:          Corsair  CX430  430 Watts
CPU   brand:                       AMD     
CPU model:                        FX 4100 Quad Core
RAM   :                                 Corsair     type:  DDR3 – 1333  CL9  Dual
Two sticks of 2048 Mb / DRAM frequency  671.2 Mhz

[autotech]

First off how big are your hard drives. Yes their is a limitation but there are way around it. List make and model and size of hard drives and i will see if i can help you out. Or anyone else if im not in here at the time.

[Vezina]

If they are Seagate you should first test them on other PC-s and see if they work ,then update the firmwares on them.

The number of hard drives is limited by the SATA ports you are using.Limitations occur though if you install windows on higher capacities HDD-s.

I would also update to W7 as the board will behave much better on W7.
Seen it at work with XP ,i had one myself ,the CPU is simply crippled under XP.
Use AHCI.
Do not install HDD-s in the 2 ports reserved for optical units they will under perform and run in multiword speeds and not ultra DMA.

Also update the BIOS to latest as it has some updates for the SATA controller.