Asus Crosshair IV Formula: Need Knowlegeable Answers for SATA

Slacker7

Slacker7

Member
I am building my brother-in-law a gaming system using this board. To be honest I have never worked with such a high end board before and so I have questions concerning the SATA installation. The manual states: "If you use a SATA optical drive to run the OS installation, we strongly recommend you install the SATA drive to connectors 5/6 and set them to [IDE] mode."

1. The DVD drive is SATA so why IDE mode?

2. Once the OS is installed and since this will be a SATA DVD drive, should I then set it to SATA in the BIOS? If not, why not?

In fact the manual goes on to state that all SATA ports are set to IDE mode by default. In IDE mode, you can boot/data hard disk drives to these connectors.

Or is is that by forcing IDE mode it ensures compatibility with 'legacy OSes' - those that don't natively support SATA? I imagine if you install something like Vista/7/or any modern kernel linux distro that there would be no problem with it in native SATA. Correct or not?

The OS is Windows 7 -64-bit so should I set the SATA DVD drive to SATA in the BIOS and then install 7?

What am I failing to understand? :o

Thanks.
 
If you use IDE mode for both. No speed loss. More stable. Plus all you really lose is hotswap. But since your installing 7 you should not have a problem running both drives with AHCI mode.
 
Thanks Drenlin and StrangleHold. You guys are correct and it is much appreciated for your insight. I can't believe I missed that piece of information but obviously I did. :o

This board is loaded with features.

By the way, this is the only place that could give me the answer I was looking for.
 
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