How many drives are supported by common sata mobos?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Bob
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Bob

It's a few years since I built a PC and I'm unsure about how many drives
are supported by modern mobos. Most seem to have 2 Sata channels and 2
ordinary ide channels, which suggests a total of 6 devices. Is that
correct, or are there restrictions?
 
Bob said:
It's a few years since I built a PC and I'm unsure about how many drives
are supported by modern mobos. Most seem to have 2 Sata channels and 2
ordinary ide channels, which suggests a total of 6 devices. Is that
correct, or are there restrictions?
Click to expand...

Actually there are some that support more. I think I have seen as many
as 6 SATA plugs, definitely 4, and I believe I have seen some with 3 IDE
channels to support 6 drives; usually intended for RAID, but most RAID
capable channels will also run Non-RAID.

If you put a SCSI Ultra160 or Ultra320 controller in, and you can put at
least two on a single motherboard, you can put 15 drivers per
controller. I guess you would run out of drive letters, though. I
don't think you can go past 'Z' but I don't know for sure.
 
It's a few years since I built a PC and I'm unsure about how many drives
are supported by modern mobos. Most seem to have 2 Sata channels and 2
ordinary ide channels, which suggests a total of 6 devices. Is that
correct, or are there restrictions?
Click to expand...

No, 4 devices:
o SATA is 1 drive for 1 channel
---- so 2 SATA channels = 2 drives
---- there is no master/slave daisychaining
o ATA is 2 drive for 1 channel
---- so 2 ATA channels = 4 drives

Some motherboards have more channels, eg, 8 drives are possible.

If you need a lot of drives, it is easy to add a 4-port SATA card.
Remember sizing the PSU re multiple drives (all adds up :-)
 
No, 4 devices:
o SATA is 1 drive for 1 channel
---- so 2 SATA channels = 2 drives
---- there is no master/slave daisychaining o ATA is 2 drive for 1 channel
---- so 2 ATA channels = 4 drives
Click to expand...

That's actually what I meant by 6 devices.

What I was getting at was whether there are likely to be any restrictions
on combining sata and pata drives. I downloaded the manual for the Asus
K8V and I noticed that in the bios section, the screenshots only showed
the traditional PM,PS,SM,SS entries, and I wondered if the two sata
channels shared some hardware with the primary ide channel.
 
Bob said:
That's actually what I meant by 6 devices.

What I was getting at was whether there are likely to be any restrictions
on combining sata and pata drives. I downloaded the manual for the Asus
K8V and I noticed that in the bios section, the screenshots only showed
the traditional PM,PS,SM,SS entries, and I wondered if the two sata
channels shared some hardware with the primary ide channel.
Click to expand...

There are no restrictions that I am aware of of mixing types of drives.
The computer I am on right now has IDE, SCSI u160, standard SCSI, and
SATA all working at the same time.

My 2 SATA are not RAID configured. Don't know about the minute details
of how the chips are wired. Doesn't cause me any problems, so I don't
even think about it.
 
There are restrictions. If you use SATA drives as primary
boot drives, you cannot put an IDE drive on IDE 0.
Generally, you want to configure your system as:
1 SATA drive 160 gig split C = 60 gig D = 100 gig
using the D-drive to hold a C-drive image, plus
daily manual backups of email and docs.
1 DVD combo drive on IDE 1
1 Floppy ( for recovery or SATA driver )
No zip ... use USB Flash drives
1 USB external 160 gig hot swapping drive for
backups and power down to archive data. Be sure
to backup your drive image files

Don't be one of these clowns and load your system
with hard drives. There is absolutely no reason to do
something like that. Reserve the rest of your power
supply for a first rate video card ... modem, or whatever.
I like the ATI 9800 Pro 128. The All-in-Wonder
version of that card will also take TV input and do
video capture. Nice, but pricey. I use Hauppague
WinTV for that. Works fine.

johns
 
I have 2 Abit NF7S v2.0 machines here with sata drives as well as ide all
connected and boot from the sata drives all the time. It is a matter of
setting the boot order in the bios to boot Sata and not HDD0 first and make
sure the sata drive is bootable.

Regards, Bob "hopelessly insane machine warrior" Troll
 
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