New to SATA - advice please.

plasmahal · 1 May 2007 at 09:41

Hi,

My new system components arrived yesterday, so I took my time building it last night. I have the Rev3.3 gigabyte DS3P board, C2D E6420, 2 x 1GB crucial ballistix 800mhz and a single Western digital 500GB sata drive.

The system booted and posted first time.

Obviously I won't be running a raid array.

Question is:

What settings should i use in the bios to get the maximum performance from the drive ?

Should i use the intel or gigabyte sata connectors ?

What does AHCI really do ?

I have the latest sata drivers on floppy ready to intall along with XP Pro.

thanks in advance.

rpstewart · 1 May 2007 at 11:00

Firstly use the Intel ports, they're directly integrated into the Southbridge rather than on a PCIe lane like the JMicron ports. Mind you neither are going to be bandwidth limited.

I'd be tempted to leave the ports in legacy mode, I've not seen anything which suggests that there is a huge benefit to be gained from AHCI, NCQ or any of the other wee SATA tweaks. The side benefit of using legacy mode is that no drivers are required at install time.

plasmahal · 1 May 2007 at 12:06

By legacy mode - i assume you mean IDE bios setting for the sata drive ????

Will i still get 3Gb/s as per the specification of the board ?

At the moment the drive is plugged into the intel port 0.

rpstewart · 1 May 2007 at 12:33

plasmahal said:
By legacy mode - i assume you mean IDE bios setting for the sata drive ????

I can't remember the exact setting, don't have a DS3P manual to hand at the moment.

plasmahal said:
Will i still get 3Gb/s as per the specification of the board ?

No but that's due to the drive, it'll burst close to 300Mb/s but the sustained rate will only be 80Mb/s tops.

plasmahal · 1 May 2007 at 13:08

I'll check the manual when i get home tonight.

Also, I intend to partion the drive as follows:

XP - 40Gb
Vista - 50Gb
games - 200Gb
media - 200Gb
scratch - 10Gb

All my apps will go on the o/s partitions. just been readin the forume and some people don't bother or say that partitioning is a waste of time, but surely an unpartitioned drive will take an eternity to de-frag ?

SpaghettiOs · 1 May 2007 at 16:52

Not necessarily. It all depends on how often you defrag and how much installing/uninstalling/other file tasks you do.

Partitioning a drive certainly won't make it any faster, as the hard drive can only read one sector at a time. Of course you do need seperate partitions for Vista and XP, but I wouldn't suggest splitting up the drive further.

Of course I'm not a complete expert on this, but look around on the web. Theres plenty of information.

PhillyDee · 1 May 2007 at 17:25

If you want to partition, id recommend just the 3. Since you will have to Install your games on both Vista and XP seperately (And they may get confused if they are both installed on the same drive) id just go 150 Gb / 150GB for both. Mind you, you could get away with quite a bit less. Then keep your media on the seperate partition.

plasmahal · 1 May 2007 at 22:25

The last 2 systems I built I have always partitioned so games go on a different partition. But, even is you re-install the O/S, the games are useless. Is it better then to have games on the o/s partition ?