Pio

[Deleted member 79192]

I noticed that this motherboard at TigerDirect.ca (was looking for mobo upgrade) supports 8 IDE devices, with this thing called "PIO Modes". What does this mean? What is "PIO"? Is it like an IDE version of RAID? I'm a n00b when it comes to HDDs, so please don't flame me for this n00b-ish question about the type of harddrive.

 

[Ice Czar]

its a glacially slow ATA transfer speed
modern HDD employ UDMA mode 5
and modern opticals UDMA mode2

review
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=741512 > Optimizing Physical Configuration
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confTiming-c.html
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/modes_UDMA.htm
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confTiming-c.html

 

[psyno]

Programmed Input/Output. Nothing to do with RAID. Huge CPU overhead, so it's very slow. A bit archaic... The different PIO modes correspond to different transfer rates, basically. It's useful in that you're virtually guaranteed compatibility using PIO 0, but it's definitely not what you want to use if you need fast data transfers to/from the IDE device.