Which SATA ports?

D

djnes

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Mar 24, 2000
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This may be in the wrong forum, but here goes. My DS3 has two sets of SATA ports. Gigabyte's SATA and the Intel ICH8 SATA. I have an SE16 SATA drive as the only drive in my system right now. Should I be using the Gigabyte ports, or the ICH8 ones? I know the Gigabyte ports support SATAII, but I can't find a definitive answer on the Intel ones.

It appears that my SE16 drive isn't even an SATAII, so maybe it doesn't matter which ones I use.
 
From the block diagram, it appears that the ICH8 channels are directly attached to the SB, while the GB sata channels are via PCIe. In the end, it should not matter much, but installation may be easier with the ICH8 channels, since it could be that the GB ports require a driver with winxp.
 
I didn't have to load any drivers for the ICH8. I'm having problem somewhere else, though. My IDE DVD drive shows up as connected to the Gigabyte controller, and shows up in device manager as a SCSI device. It's firmware utility won't let me update. I was playing around with the BIOS, so I should have just let it alone in IDE mode from the very beginning.
 
ICH8 does not have ide support anymore, which is the reason for the additional controller with the IDE and SATA ports. I am not sure if any BIOS settings would make your DVD drive show up as IDE or not.
 
The manual leads me to believe the settings for the AHCI are only for the Gigabyte controllers...but I can't get a good confirmation of that.
 
I am on AHCI expert, but since most references to AHCI on the internet lead to Intel's website, I would assume it's an intel thing
 
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