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Ask the Doctor

SATA vs. IDE

Posted 09/15/09 at 04:25:35 PM  by The Maximum PC Staff

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Ask the Doctor LogoI am planning on building a new video-editing system and have never configured SATA devices before.

Does the SATA architecture work in a similar fashion as IDE (i.e., master and slave devices per channel) or are the ports single-homed? I was planning on building a system with RAID 1 OS drives, a separate swap file drive, and RAID 1 data drives. That would use up five ports if they are single-homed. Which brings me to my second question: Is there a benefit to having SATA optical drives or should I put them on the IDE channels?

—Matthew Miller
 

Matthew, SATA ports are single-homed and single-channel: one drive, one port. So you won’t be able to run master-slave setups via SATA. The good news is that most modern motherboards feature on-board RAID controllers that will make setting up your arrays easy. One note of caution, however: Intel’s ICHR south bridge chipsets won’t let you designate certain ports as SATA and others as RAID after the fact very easily. That is, if you want to start with one drive and later add RAID to the other ports, the drive with the OS on it will usually stop booting because it has to be added to an array. But Nvidia’s chipsets will allow you to, for example, set up four ports as RAID and one as a standard SATA.

There’s no real advantage to running optical drives on SATA as opposed to IDE, provided you can still find a good IDE optical drive. That at least will allow you to free up your SATA ports for your RAID.

Another idea is to grab an inexpensive RAID controller, like the HighPoint RocketRAID 2640x4 to run your RAID, and keep your onboard SATA ports free for your swap and optical drives.

 

SUBMIT YOUR QUESTION Are flames shooting out of the back of your rig? First, grab a fire extinguisher and douse the flames. Once the pyrotechnic display has fizzled, email the doctor at doctor@maximumpc.com for advice on how to solve your technological woes.
COMMENTS:5
TAGS: sata, ask the doctor, IDE
COMMENTS
avatarClarification - SATA PM

Submitted by pofarrell on Wed, 09/16/2009 - 1:36am

Think of a Port Multiplier as a USB hub.  It is possible to plug a Sata PM into a single host SATA port and a achieve up to a 1:15 relationship ie: 1 physical host SATA port supporting 15 SATA hard disks, hence my comment about the 1:1 relationship being a little misleading.

Please note that many SATA ports do NOT support SATA PM, and frankly the documentation of those that do is mostly extremely lacking.

In most instances there is no hub as such, the PM sits on the backplane of the SATA expansion chasis that you buy.

The goal of SATA PM was to provide easy, cost effective expansion of SATA storage.  The limit being, that the host port is still only 1.5/3Gb/s, so obviously it can be easily oversubscribed.  Given your application oversubscription may well not be an issue.

regards

Paul

 

 

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avataropticals raided

Submitted by arch-chancellor on Tue, 09/15/2009 - 4:50pm

I can't use SATA OPs because my MOBO sets all SATA ports to RAID. Even if I only use the first two for HDDs. So, in order to to watch a DVD I have to put it in before turning on my computer. If I put the disk in while the computer is on, it won't read it. So I'm stuck with IDE. Sad because I spent the money buying SATA OPs and can't use them, plus I want a BLU-Ray burner and all the ones I found are are SATA.

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avatarSeeing that this is what the

Submitted by COMMANDER_COOK on Tue, 09/15/2009 - 4:38pm

Seeing that this is what the doctor chose, I'd hate to see how bad the other questions were.

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avatarWhats missleading about

Submitted by nsvander on Tue, 09/15/2009 - 4:30pm

Whats missleading about it?  You can only install one drive per sATA port on the motherboard.  If you have 5 ports you can only install 5 drives. 

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avatarSATA PM

Submitted by pofarrell on Tue, 09/15/2009 - 2:58pm

Doctor

This information is misleading with repect to SATA Port Multiplier.  Particularly where you make the statement one drive, one port.  More detailed explanation in the context of this questions is required.

 

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