Which SATA connectors to use? edited

[TenBlade]

My board has 6 SATA connectors controlled by ICH10R, two controlled by Gigabyte SATA2, and two controlled by Marvell 9128 . Now, I roughly know what raid is, but have never set up raid (on purpose ). The two first mentioned rows of SATA connectors are listed as 3 Gb/s. The latter as 6 Gb/s, but compatible with 3Gb/s.

I´m using two standard hard drives, 7200 rpm and what ever slow data transfer rate, one for OS and storage, the other for FSX.

Is one of the three types of SATA connectors better than the other concidering my non-raid setup?

Bjorn

[Woutertje]

Not as far as i know, it would have if you had an SATA600 drive. But the really knowledgeable people on here might (and moste likely will) know more then me.

[peterhayes]

Bjorn

As far as I am aware there is no priority connections for SATA on a motherboard. 

There would be NO significant advantage in connecting a SATAII (3GB/s) drive to a SATAIII (6GB/s) connection, neither would there be a disadvantage. 

I would use the connectors that are easier to access and the ones that you don't disturb when working on the mobo, etc. 

However if you buy a SATAIII drive it will need to be connected to a SATAIII connector for it to work optimally.  (Most gurus think SATAIII is not that much faster than SATAII - but who knows). 

The consensus is that a SATAIII drive connected to SATA II connector would not work.

Regards

pH

[Maurice_King]

check the jumper's on the rear of the HDD and see if it is switchable from 1.5 to 3 Gb/Sec and plug it into SATA0 your next drive the same and plug it into SATA1 etc  Now depending on what drive you have doing what you would set them to be Master's and any DVD/CD's as slave although older systems prefer if your Burner is actually a master.

[TenBlade]

Think my harddrives are four and 1½ years old respectively. But I´ll have a look see

Thanks for your input, guys!

B

[Iain Emms]

Well then chaps is it worth buying a SSD with a Sata 111 connection or will you get the same performance with a SSD connected to the Sata 11 connection im at a loss here been looking at the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive for a future buy, my motherboard has both connections but i dont know a lot about SSD only that they are fast. Having just read the above post saying that  (Most gurus think SATAIII is not that much faster than SATAII - but who knows). i thought i would ask the more aware folks here to see what you can throw into the ring.

cheers

Iain

[peterhayes]

Iain

There will be a slight gain with a SATA III over a SATA II SSD but intial results are showing that it will be much less than advertised and certainly not double as you would expect.  There have been issues with the type (I think) of Flash NAND controller/processor  on SSDs to optimize the SATA 3 bandwidth, but that seems to have been fixed in the latest versions.  IMHO you will  see some difference on loading times of FSX installed on a SATA 2 SSD to FSX installed on a SATA 3 SSD, but it may not be significant.  That of course may well change as technology advances yet again and like the early SATA 2 SSDs expect teething troubles!

Regards

PeterH