Re: Almost there, but confused about SATA selection in BIOS

Ihatefishsauce wrote:
Success!! I double checked all connections and finally powered up.
It went right into the BIOS. It's alive! Temperatures seem to hover
at around 118-125 degrees F. The only problem I had was a noisy fan,
which was screwed to the case but when I relocated it, the noise was
gone. It recognized all the 2GB of memory (2048MB) and the drives.
Now that I am in the BIOS, I will need to go very slowly to configure
it. I am now very confused at all the BIOS settings and particularly
the SATA drives. I really don't know how to configure them. I want
to get the most efficiency out of them and am wondering exactly how I
should configure them. Just two 320GB SATA drives. NO RAID.;; Just a
C and D drive. Per Paul's suggestion, the two DVD burners are on the
primary ide channel as master and slave. Can someone please tell me
how exactly to configure these SATA drives for the most efficiency
since I now need to install the operating system (WIN XP SP1).

Thanks all!


Leave them at Auto ? :-)

The board is P5GDC-V Deluxe.

Storage devices are ICH6R (one ribbon cable, four SATA) and ITE 8212F
with two ribbon cables.

The SATA offers:

1) Standard IDE
2) AHCI
3) RAID mode

For Standard IDE, the "Enhanced Mode" is the one you should use, as
it allows all six ports to be used, and places the controllers in
the PCI address space, for use with the default driver in WinXP SP1/SP2.

As far as I know, the AHCI and RAID, need the RAID driver (installed via
F6 during a clean install or a repair install). The IDE option
should be able to use the built-in driver in WinXP SP1 or SP2.

AHCI allows command reordering for better performance in server environments.
The term used here is "Native Command Queueing".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHCI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing

If you were running a benchmark such as HDTach, the performance should be no
different, because access would be sequential and already optimal, while the
surface is being scanned by the benchmark. Presumably, random access, and
more than one application thread, would be needed to see an advantage.
(One web article I looked at, used IOMeter to try and spot a performance
difference.)

The advantage might be 10%, if you were serving files to several other
interactive computers, from your computer. If simultaneous requests for
three different areas of the disk came in, the controller could execute
them in a seek time optimal fashion.

AFAIK, switching drivers is a "catch 22" situation. If you have any
plans of running AHCI or RAID, you should use the RAID driver from
day one. This will make RAID migration easier. And might even allow you
to change to AHCI mode, as I think it is the same driver.

If you are not interested in RAID, and don't want to mess with AHCI,
the standard IDE driver native to Windows should do the job.

On my computer, the emphasis during installation, is portability. I
want the ability to move my disk, to as many other motherboards as possible,
without issue. For that purpose, I would pick "Standard IDE", as that
offers the best hope of being able to move the disk. While AHCI/RAID
are exciting toys to play with, moving the drive later may be a
scary experience. If you have a thorough backup strategy, with
"bare metal" recovery capability (i.e. a boot CD that can restore the
backup image and make a new boot drive), then perhaps you don't care
about this quite as much.

If you offered me 60MB/sec non-portable storage, versus 50MB/sec
portable storage, I would take the latter one.

Paul
.

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