AB9 Pro - Which SATA?

[d3fiant]

recently moved from my trusted IC7-MAX3 to the AB9 Pro mobo coupled with a 7950GT, E6600 C2D and 2GB 667DDR2, so far I am very impressed.

Have a few questions perhaps some peeps here can help with.
1) I have a 4 SATA drives, 2 SATA1 (80GB 200GB) and 2 SATA2 (200GB 320GB), currently they are all sitting on the ICH8 SATA ports in IDE mode. Would there be any performance factors that would change that arrangement, I have split the 320GB which is new and use a partiton on that for OS, should I make use of the JMicron or Silicon controllers?

2)I notice that there is no remove hardware icon in the taskbar traditionaly seen when using USB storage. I was under the impression that this appeared when using SATA2 drives as they are hot plug, am I running in SATA1 mode only? how best to find that out?

TIA, nice to see abit back to its past glories, was very concerned it was going to be no more at one point. Also nice to see the UK abit peeps here at Hexus

d3fiant

[ABIT Sean]

There wouldn't be a lot of difference moving your drives to another controller.

If you wanted to use the hard drives as hot plug they would need to connected to one of the additional controllers (jmicron or silicon image).

[d3fiant]

thanks for the response, hot plug wasnt the main concern, I was expecting that icon to confirm my SATA2 drives were indeed running at SATA2, in all honesty just trying to squeeze everything out of stock performance before I consider an oc. TBH its all running sweet, replaced the stock cooler with my evo120 which I didnt fink would fit, temps dropped to 22C idle and 36C load, sweet

[ABIT Sean]

The hard drives will only run in sata2 mode if the bios is set to raid or SATA mode. Also the hard drives will not run at 300mbs all the time as they are unable to cope running at that speed.

[d3fiant]

appreciate the heads up, gonna have a play with the bios when I get home from work

[[GSV]Trig]

Have you noticed a pause when you reboot, when I boot mine from cold it fires up fine, when I reboot it sits and takes a while checking the SATA drives (1-6) then fires up as normal, havent played with anything yet as I'm used to having to press the reset button as my old An8Ultra used to just sit at POST too lol...

[Supershanks]

The removable drive icon is predominant on nvidia chipset & is applicable to all sata drives not just sata2. Have you checked in control panel - device manager - Ide/Ata conrtollers, there may be some info there re transfer rate.
[GSV]Trig does it make any difference if you disable unused ports in bios.

luck

[[GSV]Trig]

Doesnt make any difference, the controller is either on or off..

[ABIT Sean]

There are no major increase in performance by running the hard drives in SATA2 as your hard drive can not handle the max speed.

[d3fiant]

I gave AHCI mode a go and it was a nightmare, took forever to boot, almost like it had problems scanning the drives when running the AHCI bios. I have now gone back to IDE mode which is fine.

[[GSV]Trig]

Aye I'm in AHCI mode, cba to reinstall tho which I will have to if I change mode no?

[d3fiant]

I moved from IDE to AHCI and got BSOD probs so I rebuilt, having to do the F6 bit. AHCI worked fine with the new build, however I found the boot part of AHCI too long so switched back to IDE WITHOUT a rebuild and have experienced no problems. So I would say you should be able to change back to IDE with no probs, however if you want to change to RAID mode I cannot comment on wether or not a rebuild will be needed

[Highland3r]

The hard drives will only run in sata2 mode if the bios is set to raid or SATA mode. Also the hard drives will not run at 300mbs all the time as they are unable to cope running at that speed.

Sustained read of the sata2 drives is no more than that of Sata1, sata2 drives DO gain in burst read/writes. MUCH faster burst read which is where sata2 gains over sata1.

[[GSV]Trig]

Hmmm, pretty sure I tried a mode change before, will try it again see if it boots..

Back in a bit...

[Johnny Bravo]

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/Revi...16014&PageId=0

A bit dated but it gives a good overview of the differences of SATA I and SATA II