Does disk ordering matter?

[Coldblackice]

Does the physical ordering of drives connected to SATA ports matter (in any degree)?

While adding a new drive to my system, I dusted/cleaned/tidied up. In the process, however, I guess I've switched which drives were connected to which SATA ports. In the BIOS, I shifted my SSD drive back up to the top as the boot drive.

Is there any reason or (tangible) benefit in the ordering of drives on respective SATA ports? For reference, there are 6 drives, and they're all connected to the same Intel ICH10R (x58) controller.

It's a slight OCD-like annoyance to see the drive ordering "changed" in my HD diagnostics program in windows (which is ordering them according to the disk/port# connected to), but if there's no particular reason or performance benefit to be had by "lowering" a drive's port number, I think I'll just leave it as is, rather than re-jumble the connections.

 

[cortexodus]

Does the physical ordering of drives connected to SATA ports matter (in any degree)?

Nope

 

[toast0]

In some case (not yours, AFAIK), you might have some ports higher speed than others. There was also the problem with the 6 series chipset where some of the ports were likely to die (was recalled). Sometimes it's easiest to boot from the lowest number port, but if it's working now, I wouldn't bother with it.

 

[Coldblackice]

Nope

In some case (not yours, AFAIK), you might have some ports higher speed than others. There was also the problem with the 6 series chipset where some of the ports were likely to die (was recalled). Sometimes it's easiest to boot from the lowest number port, but if it's working now, I wouldn't bother with it.

Good to know -- thanks!

 

[staticlag]

It does matter.

SATA addresses drives by the port. Typically operating systems do a fairly good job of keeping it simple for the end user, but you can't mix and match SATA drives and ports without something, either you or the operating system figuring it out.

SAS, in contrast, addresses drives directly so it doesn't matter where you connect the drive on the card/motherboard to or whether you put a dozen expander between it and the host, the drive will know it is the one being addressed and it will answer correctly.

If you just have a few drives, or are not doing any type of RAID it doesn't really matter much. But once you get a few dozen drives and whether you want to get into RAID, it can matter very much where a drive is plugged in (on SATA)

 

[cortexodus]

It does matter.

SATA addresses drives by the port. Typically operating systems do a fairly good job of keeping it simple for the end user, but you can't mix and match SATA drives and ports without something, either you or the operating system figuring it out.

SAS, in contrast, addresses drives directly so it doesn't matter where you connect the drive on the card/motherboard to or whether you put a dozen expander between it and the host, the drive will know it is the one being addressed and it will answer correctly.

If you just have a few drives, or are not doing any type of RAID it doesn't really matter much. But once you get a few dozen drives and whether you want to get into RAID, it can matter very much where a drive is plugged in (on SATA)

I guess I've never encountered this issue. I have even migrated a 6-drive set of 2 RAID arrays (1x RAID 0+1 and 1x RAID 0) from one machine(M4A87TD/USB3) to another(GA-990FXA-UD3) without even remotely paying attention to which drives were plugged into which ports and everything worked flawlessly after the next boot once I turned on RAID on the new board. All that matters in my experience is ensuring that the controller you're plugging into is the same.

Also, OP's sig indicates he's got 3 conventionals and 1 SSD. He's probably fine.