Which sata ports

rubin1961 · 20 Aug 2009 at 07:07

I have the ex58-ud5 m/board which will have 3 hard drives and all have vista 64 home installed and a sata dvd drive.
What i would like to know is which port to put my main hard drive in or dosnt it matter.
Thanks

JonJ678 · 20 Aug 2009 at 07:09

The one labelled 0 is probably the best call.The one closest to the 24 pin power cable, and next to the board.

Wont matter much, but the board is likely to boot from 0 as default, so this way you wont have to set the default boot device in the bios

rubin1961 · 20 Aug 2009 at 07:17

Thanks mate

mrk · 20 Aug 2009 at 09:04

If you use AHCI mode it's likely port 0-3 will be set to Native IDE mode so you'd need to put the windows boot drive into port 5 or 6 since 0-4 won't be in pure AHCI mode.

Unlike IDE, SATA ports don't mind what order drives are in.

rubin1961 · 20 Aug 2009 at 09:44

sorry but what is AHCI mode

mrk · 20 Aug 2009 at 09:54

AHCI mode enables full SATA generation II features such as NCQ, Hotswapping etc.

Full details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface

AHCI mode needs to be enabled before Windows is installed in the BIOS otherwise you get a BSOD (Windows XP, some systems on Vista) but Windows 7 does not have this issue as it has native AHCI support but if you install Win7 without AHCI enabled then the AHCI driver is disabled by default and you need to flick a registry switch to enable it before changing AHCI mode in the BIOS.

Simple and easy stuff