SATA Queries

J

johnmcarter

Member
I have 5 SATA connectors on my mobo but have just noticed that two of the SATA connectors are black and the MOBO handbook says that these two do not support IDE mode, only AHCI+RAID.

Can someone please clarify what this means - can I use one of them to connect either a HDD or an Optical drive, or not? Perhaps I'm being a bit thick but I thought SATA superseded IDE and that things are SATA connected or IDE connected - how can they be both!!
 
They are probably on a different controller that drops IDE support in favour of being able to RAID the SATA drives. You can use any SATA port you want for any device, just ensure that your boot order is set up properly, normally it goes like this:

1) CD/DVD
2) HDD
3) USB/External boot
4) Network
 
It can be both in theory. Sata did supersede IDE, but many SATA controllers have a setting to run IDE mode (a software version of IDE) to run older systems not able to use Sata drives, like 9x systems, or DOS, or even windows 2000.

As was said above, they are probably on a separate RAID controller that does not support IDE mode. any Sata drive will work on any Sata port, as long as you dont need IDE mode.
 
Thanks for that. I'm still a bit confused as to why you'd want to use IDE on a SATA connector (why not connect to the IDE connector if the mobo is old enough to have one or two??). As long as I can use all 5 SATA conns on my mobo, I'm happy! Thanks again for the help
 
there is a maximum hard drive size to the IDE bus. 250GB as far as I remember. The SATA bus, even in IDE mode can run 3+ TB hard drives.

Plus it is more than just the desktops. The ICH chipset is used in laptops also. Not all laptops have a IDE connector to use when you need it. IDE mode will allow the use of legacy systems without having a IDE connector on these systems.
 
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