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Questions about GIGABYTE products => Motherboards with Intel processors => Topic started by: vwfan65 on February 27, 2011, 05:10:19 pm

Title: H55M-USB3 SATA optimization
Post by: vwfan65 on February 27, 2011, 05:10:19 pm

  So I have dodged or overcome many of the common issues others have had with this board, and now I am pretty happy with it.

My question concerns SATA optimization.

This board has 5 standard SATA ports, and two more which are controlled by an onboard hardware SATA controller device. That hardware device also controls the PATA socket, which I need for an older DVD-RW drive.

I already have the hardware device enabled for the Pata support. Is there any advantage to using those 2 SATA ports vs. the other 5? Less drain on the CPU?

I have also noticed that setting the Bios to treat Sata as ACHI vs IDE has really lengthened my boot up time. The setting looks like it should only apply to the hardware Sata controller, but I think the bios makes your setting a global choice for all SATA ports...
I have also noticed that the Bois  lists the Sata ports and my devices sort of funky- some are slave, others are master. Some ports have two slaves, some have none.

Can anyone help clear up all of this SATA business on this board?

Title: Re: H55M-USB3 SATA optimization
Post by: Dark Mantis on February 27, 2011, 06:43:31 pm

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

The Gigabyte BIOS is a bit confusing with the way it reports the SATA drives as IDE master/slave etc but it doesn't actuallly make any difference to their operation.

I would advise you to get rid of your old IDE PATA optical drive and invest in a nice new SATA one. Only about £12 so not expensive, I just bought one from Ebuyer 24 speed multi everything Lite-On. Often trying to run both SATSA and PATA on the same board presents problems.

Put the optical drive on one controller like the GSATA and the hard drives on the Intel ICH10 Southbridge controlled ports. Also set the controller to IDE mode for the optical drive and AHCI for the hard drives.

Title: Re: H55M-USB3 SATA optimization
Post by: GoodBytes on April 11, 2011, 04:13:02 am

SATA and PATA controllers don't use the CPU at all. That is why SATA is far superior than USB 3.0, not to mention also optimized for 1 thing, and 1 thing only.. data transfer. USB is not.