Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 : multiple SATA2 confusion!

[martianrobot]

Hi,

Can anybody tell my why the GA-965P-DS4 has two different SATA2 controllers onboard? One's Intel and the other is Gigabyte, and they control 6 and 2 drives respectively. Great to have so many drive connectors, but which one should I use?

To avoid power and noise problems I'm probably only going to run one Samsung SP 250gb SATA2 drive and an IDE NEC DVD-RW, though I may decide to have an 80gb SATA2 drive for the system disk (or maybe a 76mb WD Raptor if someone can convince me they ain't too noisy) and use the 250gb disk for data/music/pr0n etc

Say I go for the single disk option now - whats the best onboard controller for that and what mode should I set it too for optimum SATA2 speed? IDE or AHCI? Also, if I went for AHCI mode does that mean I have to create a driver disk for XP pre-setup?

I've not had a SATA2 system, though I did setup a RAID array on a SATA system before. I'm not bothered about RAID at the moment, though the thought of two Raptors setup on RAID sends a shiver down my spine!

 

[stoofa]

Going for either the Intel or Gigabyte SATA controller you will need either an F6 boot disk or a slipstreamed version of Windows with the correct drivers.
You need to remember Windows was released before either of these controllers and it is very difficult to be "forward compatible".

Until somebody does some conclusive tests it is going to be nigh impossible to say which is the better controller.
I have a DS4 and I'm using the Intel controllers for my SATA2 HD's.
Mainly because they are part of the ICH8R controller rather than being an add-in option.

The DS4 has loads of SATA ports which is surely a good thing considering none of them have to be RAID and they can all control HD's and Optical Drives - give you a lot more scope for adding new drives in the future.
Never complain about too many sockets/ports on a motherboard

The thought of running too Raptor's in RAID sends shivers down my spine too - but probably not for the same reason as it does you.
The thought of the noise generated and the fact I'd by paying almost 4x as much per GB for what really wouldn't give you a major boost in actual, visible performance (other than benchmarks) makes me pleased I'm not even going to consider it.

 

[Graeme43]

Going for either the Intel or Gigabyte SATA controller you will need either an F6 boot disk or a slipstreamed version of Windows with the correct drivers.

Whaa I never had to do this for my nf4

 

[killer_uk]

Whaa I never had to do this for my nf4

I didn't need to do it for my DS4, so you should be fine