New to SATA - advice please.

[plasmahal]

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.

 

[plasmahal]

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.

 

[plasmahal]

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 ?

 

[plasmahal]

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 ?