ECS P965T-A Motherboard, Which SATA ports to use?

[markharris2000]

I find myself ready to install an ECS P965T-A motherboard (with E6400
cpu) which has 5 SATA ports. Four of them are BLACK and seem to be
controller by Intel ICH8 chip. The fifth socket is Orange/Reddish in
color and appears to be controlled by JMicron's chipset which also
supplies the EIDE PATA port.

Question: I have a SATA-II, 3Gb/s drive that I want to use as "C:" on
fastest port running Vista-Ultimate 32 bit O/S. Which is the fastest
port on this P965T-A mobo? I have been assuming it is the single,
orange/red port. Is that correct?

 

[Pecos]

(e-mail address removed) wrote in @o5g2000hsb.googlegroups.com:

I find myself ready to install an ECS P965T-A motherboard (with E6400
cpu) which has 5 SATA ports. Four of them are BLACK and seem to be
controller by Intel ICH8 chip. The fifth socket is Orange/Reddish in
color and appears to be controlled by JMicron's chipset which also
supplies the EIDE PATA port.

Question: I have a SATA-II, 3Gb/s drive that I want to use as "C:" on
fastest port running Vista-Ultimate 32 bit O/S. Which is the fastest
port on this P965T-A mobo? I have been assuming it is the single,
orange/red port. Is that correct?

This is the part I know
The Intel ICH8 controller hub (Southbridge - the chip with the heatsink
on the lower portion of the motherboard) supports the 4 black SATA ports
- 4 x SATA II 3.0 Gb/s.
The one orange/red SATA port is controlled by the JMB361 JMicron chip - 1
x SATA II 3.0Gb/s devices. RAID0 & RAID1 configuration.

All 5 SATA ports should be SATA II. ECS labels its SATA ports SATA
1/3/5/6/7. Find where the SATA 1 port is and use that, though any should
work. I would use the 1st black SATA II port myself.

The Intel ICH8 Southbridge does *not* support RAID. The JMicron chip
does, but when I was researching this board about 8 months ago, I saw a
lot of people having problems with it. ECS recommends that only CD/DVD
type devices and not bulk storage devices be hooked up via the IDE ports.

This is the part I am unsure of:
You *may* be able to get some sort of RAID working with one SATA drive
and one IDE drive, but I would definitely not recommend that. You have a
better chance to get RAID working with two IDE drives, but then you have
no IDE ports for your CD/DVD drive. Since ECS recommends that you don't
put a hard drive on the IDE channel (let alone two), it makes you wonder
why RAID is advertised at all. I would not recommend you use RAID on
this board.

RAID works best with two identical drives and may not work at all with
two different drives, or it will work but with degraded preformance.

So in short, since that orange/red port is controlled by the JMB361 chip,
it *may* be possible for a fortunate lucky few to get RAID working with
it, but I would not recommend it.

I know this is more information than you asked for, but someday you might
want to try RAID.

It's been a long time since I owned this board, so some of this
information may have changed since then.


Alan Norton
Reviews: ABIT AN8 SLI, ECS P965T-A & Foxconn 975X7AB-8EKRS2H Mb's
Choosing the Right Version Of Vista - Vista Confusion Article
Arizona Pics and Cute Animal Pics
http://www.mindspring.com/~anorton1/

 

[Paul]

I find myself ready to install an ECS P965T-A motherboard (with E6400
cpu) which has 5 SATA ports. Four of them are BLACK and seem to be
controller by Intel ICH8 chip. The fifth socket is Orange/Reddish in
color and appears to be controlled by JMicron's chipset which also
supplies the EIDE PATA port.

Question: I have a SATA-II, 3Gb/s drive that I want to use as "C:" on
fastest port running Vista-Ultimate 32 bit O/S. Which is the fastest
port on this P965T-A mobo? I have been assuming it is the single,
orange/red port. Is that correct?

The best way to find an answer, is look for some benchmarks.

You can find some info on Jmicron products, on their site.
This is an example.

http://www.jmicron.com/Product_JMB363.htm

The first thing I notice there, is the JMB363 uses a single PCI
Express lane. That would be 250MB/sec theoretical. SATA II can
burst at 300MB/sec theoretical. So already, the JMB363 has a
bottleneck. This is not crucial when transferring large files,
because by then the cache is full, and the media rate of the
disk is the issue. If a disk does 70MB/sec on a good day,
then two disks are easily handled by the single PCI Express lane.
The bandwidth issue is only with respect to cache bursts (i.e.
disk controller board cache, to/from the motherboard), which
is not nearly as significant.

The Intel Southbridge, has a nice fat pipe to the Northbridge.
It could be on the order of 1GB/sec, bidirectional. At least
for a single disk, or even two disks, burst to cache would
not be limited by the bus. When four disks are connected, it
is about as bad as the Jmicron situation.

Paul

 

[markharris2000]

Thanks a million! This makes the ORANGE port worthless to me as I
don't plan/need RAID. So, main drive will hang off the ICH8 first
port, and my DVDR/W drives will hand off the PATA IDE port. Problem
solved. Thanks!

 

[markharris2000]

Yes, it looks like the Jmicro pipe is a main bottleneck. Probably a
waste of chipspace on this board since they don't have TWO SATA ports,
and they don't have a BIG pipe! I'll just focus on the SATA ports....
probably hang the opticals off the PATA IDE...