Why is SATA drive showing up on IDE channel in BIOS?

[Doc]

I see a WD Caviar drive is showing up under and IDE Channel in BIOS.
I'm not intimately familiar with the BIOS conventions, wondering why
this is. Using a Gigabyte mobo.

 

[Paul]

I see a WD Caviar drive is showing up under and IDE Channel in BIOS.
I'm not intimately familiar with the BIOS conventions, wondering why
this is. Using a Gigabyte mobo.

If you're seeing references to "Master" and "Slave" in the
SATA section of the BIOS, just ignore that. SATA doesn't have
master and slave. (One drive - one cable - no sharing.) But they
need some way to enumerate the multiple ports on a SATA controller
hardware block. And that is one way for them to count them.

The reference kinda makes sense, if the BIOS is in "Compatible" mode,
since to the OS (and the user), they will appear for all practical
purposes, as if four drives are connected to two IDE ribbon cables.
That is a form of emulation for compatibility purposes. And then,
the fake "Master" and "Slave" makes sense. But on computers that
have long since passed that point, and no longer support that
kind of thing (like my laptop with AHCI only), you'd hope they'd
use a different counting scheme.

Paul

 

[Paul in Houston TX]

I see a WD Caviar drive is showing up under and IDE Channel in BIOS.
I'm not intimately familiar with the BIOS conventions, wondering why
this is. Using a Gigabyte mobo.

IDE supports both pata and sata.
Some mobos do not differentiate in words in the bios.
You should see 6-15 IDE channels. You won't get that many with pata.
Check your device manager to see if sata controllers are loaded.