Help Needed to Understand IDE\SATA Channels

[nheather]

I am building a new PC and have 4 drives fitted as follows

500GB HDD SATA - Main Drive (Win 7)
250GB HDD SATA - Secondary for Dual Boot (Win XP)
DVDRW SATA - Main Optical Disk
DVD IDE - Secondary Optical Disk

I have a Gigabyte GA-MA790FXT-UD5P MoBo and have the drives connected physically as follows

500GB HDD - SATA Channel 0
250GB HDD - SATA Channel 1
DVDRW - SATA Channel 2
DVD - IDE

As far as I am aware they are all set as MASTER

When I fired up the PC and looked in the BIOS the allocation was very different to what I was expecting. It was

500GB - Channel 3 Master
250GB - Channel 2 Master
DVDRW - Channel 2 Slave
DVD - Channel 0 Slave

Bit puzzled with the seemingly random allocation.

It occurs to me that I have no idea how the physical channels will be mapped onto the channels within the BIOS. The manual doesn't give anything away.

The MoBo has a number of disk connectors

IDE x1
FDD x1
SATA x6 (called channels 0 to 5)
GSATA x4 (called channels 0 to 3)

When we get to the BIOS there is just listing for 5 channels (called channels 0 to 4) each with a SLAVE and a MASTER.

Any idea how the BIOS maps the physical connections onto the channels in the BIOS?

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[nheather]

Made some progress myself.

I had the cables for the 250 and 500 swapped round so that explains why the 250 was being put on a lower channel than the 500.

I'm guessing that IDE takes over channels 0 and 1 which is why the first SATA appears on channel 2.

My DVD had 'Cable Select' set as a jumper and I guess the cut down IDE cable I was using was the slave side. Changed the jumper to MASTER and that sorted that out.

The only puzzle remaining is the DVDRW. This is an optiarc 7240S and it doesn't have any jumpers at all. So I've no idea why it is coming up as a Slave unless it is hardcoded in the firmware.

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[Simps]

Mine does it too, no matter which sockets you put the cables in they assign all over the place.

 

[PhillyDee]

SATA still has master and slave assignments, but only uses 1 cable. Nothing to worry about.