which SATA port to use?

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kniah

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I have a SATA hard drive and optical drive. Does it matter which SATA port I use (such as master or slave)? I remember from the PATA days to avoid using a hard drive and optical drive on the same channel, is SATA the same way? Thanks in advance.
 
Nope, They should all run fine. But if you want to, go in sequential order, SATA ports should be listed on the MB from 1 to whatever many ports there are, so I guess set your system HD to the first one and the rest, use them in whichever order. That's what I do on my computer at least.
 
JSarella said:
Nope, They should all run fine. But if you want to, go in sequential order, SATA ports should be listed on the MB from 1 to whatever many ports there are, so I guess set your system HD to the first one and the rest, use them in whichever order. That's what I do on my computer at least.
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Actually, the ports will start being numbered from zero [0] ;)
 
Some motherboards have different controllers for different ports, but that's definitely a minority and usually the ports will be physically located in different places on the board itself - just throwing that in there.
 
I usually go opti=0 hd=1. No reasson really, just preference.

Just read your manual and make sure you are using the right sets. My x48 had purple for raid and green for standard. I do not know the consequences of trying opti+hd in raid ports, never tried it.
 
The "RAID" ports are just the ones handled by the external drive controller. They should work fine in non-RAID mode as well, but it's always preferable to use the ports from the chipset for superior performance and compatibility.
 
When I try to set ACHI mode in my BIOS, the motherboard no longer sees my DVD-ROM so I can not install Vista. Once I set it to Raid or IDE, my DVD-ROM appears. If I want to set my drives to ACHI, does it matter which ports I put my hard drive and DVD-ROM?
 
EazyM3 said:
If I want to set my drives to ACHI, does it matter which ports I put my hard drive and DVD-ROM?
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No, it doesn't make a difference. That's an odd problem though. I have my drives set to AHCI mode and my motherboard has no trouble detecting everything.
 
EazyM3 said:
When I try to set ACHI mode in my BIOS, the motherboard no longer sees my DVD-ROM so I can not install Vista. Once I set it to Raid or IDE, my DVD-ROM appears. If I want to set my drives to ACHI, does it matter which ports I put my hard drive and DVD-ROM?
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Because it's AHCI not ACHI? :D J/K!

I've seen it before but I thought all newer MBs had this worked out.

AAR, to enable AHCI when Vista is installed follow this tutorial.

That guy is working on a laptop but it works on all configurations.
 
I didn't have a problem with AHCI or RAID with my optical drives. I'd try a different port. Does it show up in bios as connected?
 
There are some lame raid ports you can't use optical drives or even regular drives on.

For example the lame ass Asus xpert raid on the P5Q boards. Its slower than the ICH10R raid and you can't use it for non-raid or optical. Kinda like you got two cripple sata ports. It takes a bit of jumping through loops and holes to get it working for non-raid hard-drives though.
 
DTN107 said:
There are some lame raid ports you can't use optical drives or even regular drives on.

For example the lame ass Asus xpert raid on the P5Q boards. Its slower than the ICH10R raid and you can't use it for non-raid or optical. Kinda like you got two cripple sata ports. It takes a bit of jumping through loops and holes to get it working for non-raid hard-drives though.
Click to expand...

I used those for a RAID 1 array for storage and it wasn't too bad. It's not so much crippling SATA ports as giving you some RAID specific ones as they aren't controlled by the ICH10R anyway.
 
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