Mixing SATA drive with IDE

[Wiley Q. Hacker]

Hi:

I have a WD SATA drive, and an ECS motherboard with an Award BIOS. The BIOS
gives me the choice to treat the SATA drive as IDE or RAID. Since I have
only one SATA drive, theoretically I should not choose RAID. Correct?

But, I have two IDE drives as well that I'd like to keep in the system. I
expect my setup to look something like this:

IDE Channel 0 Master: HD 1
IDE Channel 0 Slave: HD 2
IDE Channel 1 Master: DVD-ROM
IDE Channel 1 Slave: DVD-RW
SATA Channel 0: WD HD (Boot drive)

Questions:

1. If I treat the SATA drive as IDE, will I get the 150 Mbps speed, or will
it be lowered to IDE speeds (133 Mbps)?
2. If I treat the SATA drive as IDE, it will show up as IDE Channel 2
Master. Will I still be able to boot from it?
3. If I treat the SATA drive as RAID, do I still have to install RAID
drivers in Windows XP, even if I do not use RAID?
4. If I treat the SATA drive as RAID, will I still be able to boot from it,
or will the system try to boot from IDE Channel 0 Master?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[Ruel Smith]

I have a WD SATA drive, and an ECS motherboard with an Award BIOS. The

BIOS gives me the choice to treat the SATA drive as IDE or RAID. Since I
have only one SATA drive, theoretically I should not choose RAID. Correct?
Yes.

But, I have two IDE drives as well that I'd like to keep in the system. I
expect my setup to look something like this:

IDE Channel 0 Master: HD 1
IDE Channel 0 Slave: HD 2
IDE Channel 1 Master: DVD-ROM
IDE Channel 1 Slave: DVD-RW
SATA Channel 0: WD HD (Boot drive)

Questions:

1. If I treat the SATA drive as IDE, will I get the 150 Mbps speed, or
will it be lowered to IDE speeds (133 Mbps)?

Actually, the physical drive speed is way lower than that, and I don't
believe a single drive can actually get near that transfer rate. I believe
it takes at least 2 fast drives in a RAID 0 setup to bump that ceiling, and
even that's only under brief moments. Only cached operations move that fast,
and with an 8MB cache transferring at 133MB per second or more, you can see
how littlel effect it has. However, often initial drive performance is very
high because of the cached operations going on, but they eventually settle
at the much lower physical drive transfer limit because the hard drive
cannot keep the cache satisfied. However, those are longer reads and writes.
Short bursts get incredible transfer, but still not close to 133MB pers sec
on a a single drive.

But, to answer your question, the SATA connection is still at 133 MB/s. I
don't think anything bogs down your transfer speed like it used to mixing
ATA33 and ATA66 drives. I believe that's mostly a thing of the past.

2. If I treat the SATA drive as IDE, it will show up as IDE Channel 2
Master. Will I still be able to boot from it?

I believe so...

3. If I treat the SATA drive as RAID, do I still have to install RAID
drivers in Windows XP, even if I do not use RAID?

If you have a separate SATA controller, such as Via, Promise, Highpoint, or
Silicon Image controller, then you still have to provide a driver. If it is
a built-in SATA channel that runs off the motherboards chipset, such as the
Intel ICH5R chipset, then no. Usually, the motherboard chipset will provide
you with 2 SATA channels, and any additional channels are via on onboard
controller. However, I think newer motherboards are giving more than 2
onboard SATA channels without additional controllers. Read your motherboards
manual to find out more.

4. If I treat the SATA drive as RAID, will I still be able to boot from
it, or will the system try to boot from IDE Channel 0 Master?

You need 2 drives to use RAID. You can use them as RAID 0, which sees them
both as 1 drive, RAID 1, which writes the same info to both drives, creating
an instataneous backup, or RAID 1+0, which does both. If you only have 1
drive, you simply have an IDE channel.

You're trying to think too much about this whole thing. If you have one
drive, set it up as IDE, add drivers if the channels are controlled by
additional onboard controller. If you have 2 drives and want to use them as
1 big, fast one, or make an instantaneous backup of the one to the other,
then setup the system as RAID, and you'll have to provide drivers to
Windows. They are completely separate from the normal IDE channels and don't
interfere with them. They also are completely bootable. Easy enough...