Which SATA ports to use???

R

RoyGBiv

New Member
I have a new Gigabyte motherboard which I will connect two (older) Western Digital SATA drives to along with one or two IDE/ATAPI CD/DVD ROM drives.

The motherboard has 3 different sets of SATA ports, and I don't know which to use. There are six "South Bridge" SATA2 3Gb/s connectors. There are two GSATA3 6Gb/s connectors which are controlled by a Marvell 9128 chipset. The Gigabyte SATA2 chipset controls the one IDE controller with a connector for up to 2 IDE ATA devices, and has an additional 2 SATA2 3Gb/s connectors also called GSATA2.

I will likely be configuring the SATA drives to run as IDE mode, if this matters.

I would like to know which of these connectors I should use? Will it make a difference with how the computer works or are they pretty much interchangeable? The manual makes no mention of using any specific connectors preferentially.

Thanks.

SMK
 
I always use the southbridge ports, there are driver issues with the other ones, especially if they are jbmicron. I know you said you had marvell but I was just saying.
 
It really shouldn't make any difference. I normally just use the ones on the primary chipset. If the drives are older, it shouldn't make any difference in performance if you're using SATA2 or SATA3.
 
Thanks. One of the reasons I'm asking is that the CD/DVD ROM doesn't seem to be working normally, and I wasn't sure if this was an issue with which ports things were connected to.

SMK
 
What kind of issues are you having with the cdroms? Did you jumper them correctly? one set to slave and the other master?
 
At this time only one is attached, and it seems to winXP setup is only able to read from part of the drive. According to the BIOS it is set on AUTO for "extended" versus "normal" and I'm not sure what those refer to. Then there are several settings for block size, and it is also set on AUTO, though I have tried the other options. None seem to make a difference.

I am actually planning on playing around with Hiren's boot CD and see what I can do about using some of the utilities on that disk.

SMK
 
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