Official GIGABYTE Forum

Questions about GIGABYTE products => Motherboards with Intel processors => Topic started by: natman on October 17, 2010, 03:59:10 am

Title: First build- which sata ports are best for my drive configuration?
Post by: natman on October 17, 2010, 03:59:10 am

Hi All
I am about to start my first system build using the following main components:

I7 950 cpu
GA-X58A-UD3R
Corsair 6GB DDRIII Ram  TR3X6G1600C8D
Corsair Tx-950 PSU
Intel 40GB SSD as OS drive
Western DIGI Velociraptor SataII HDD 150GB as storage drive
Asus SATAII DVD-RW

The sticky and other posts i read gave me conflicting answers and may have been for different configurations to mine.

From what i have read i think:
SSD (system drive) should be in Sata 2-0
storage HDD  should be in sata 2-4
DVD should be in sata 2-8
Is this correct?????   Should they all be set to AHCI mode?
Does it simplify things if i avoid the GSATA ports and stick the the sata ports on the south bridge?
Thanks...

Title: Re: First build- which sata ports are best for my drive configuration?
Post by: Dark Mantis on October 17, 2010, 08:48:01 am

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

For the speed aspect the Intel ICH10R Southbridge controller is the fastest one on your board and so I would definitely use that for the Velociraptors, the SSD will get about the same speed on either the same ports or the Marvell 9128 SATA3 ports but they don't pass on the TRIM commands which are important for the health of the SSD so again I would recommend the Intel ports. The DVD you can put in any, it really won't make much difference.

Title: Re: First build- which sata ports are best for my drive configuration?
Post by: Wonderwrench on October 17, 2010, 08:59:52 am

I you only have 3 SATA devices, no IDE devices and none of the SATA devices are SATA 3. I would disable the SATA 3 controller and the Gigabyte SATA 2/IDE controller as this will speed the bios post. As far as which device goes on which port I always put the boot drive on port 0. I usually place all other non optical drives on the next available ports. Optical drives on the high numbered ports so port 4 and 5. In most cases it really does not matter which devices goes where. Ports 0-5 are all the same.

This board does have an option called "SATA Port 0-3 Native Mode" that could have some affect on drive placement. The description is very weak. To me it looks like it should be enabled in Vista or Windows 7. What seems weird to me is it only affects ports 0-3. I would guess ports 4-5 are always in native mode if AHCI mode is enabled? I would rather see an option to run ports 4-5 in IDE mode while ports 0-3 are in AHCI or RAID mode. This would be handy for optical drives that do not play well in AHCI mode. Since you are going to use an SSD you will see better performance with the controller in AHCI mode.

Bill

Title: Re: First build- which sata ports are best for my drive configuration?
Post by: natman on October 17, 2010, 10:32:43 am

 :)

Thanks for clearing those issues up for me.  I'll post back later in the week when it's all assembled and running.