EzDevInfo.com

Why should I choose (or not) AHCI over IDE in my PC's BIOS settings?

I've noticed in the BIOS settings of the newer PCs I own that I can configure the drive controller work either in AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) mode, or else in IDE mode.

I'm suspecting that AHCI "performs" better, but I really don't know much about that from a practical standpoint. However, I've also noticed that certain programs (e.g. Ghost 2003) simply don't detect my hard drives if I choose AHCI mode. (AHCI = A Heck of Compatibility Issues?)

So ... why does AHCI exist, why should I care and want to use it, and why/when should I not want to use it? Are there features of newer hard drives that require AHCI, and do they otherwise dumb themselves down when running in IDE mode?

What's the difference between ATA, PATA, and IDE?

If I am not mistaken these names all referrer to the same technology. Are there any differences between them? If not, why does this technology go by so many different names?

Need clarification on what IDE hard drive size—2.5 inch versus 3.5 inch—actually means

I have some older IDE (parallel ATA) hard drives I want to check for files before tossing them out. I have found SATA/IDE to USB Adapters to use, but they specify 2.5" and 3.5" hard drive connections. My drives are all 4" X 5 3/4".

My question is, are they considered to be 3.5" and is this based on the internal disk size? I don’t want to buy something I can’t use.

How can I enable AHCI on a SATA drive after installing Windows?

Can I enable AHCI after installing Windows 7 in a SATA drive that was on IDE mode?

How can I use an old PATA hard disk drive on my newer SATA-only computer?

I've got some old hard drives I'd like to connect to my new computer to quickly transfer gigs and gigs of data from the old drives to my nice large new drives. The old drives are PATA/IDE/ATA and the new computer's motherboard only supports SATA drives.

I found this PCI IDE raid controller card. Will this work? How do I power the old drives. My power supply has only new-style connectors.

I want to do a one-time dump of miscellaneous data (mp3s, DVD images, MAME roms, photos, videos, documents, etc.) off of 5-or-6 smaller, older PATA drives onto my newer, larger SATA drives. I've been unable to "retire" two old computers because I've never gotten around to this housekeeping task. Now I want to get rid of the clutter.

I'd rather avoid the USB solutions. I've got a lot of data to transfer and I want it to go as quickly as possible.

The DVD drive is SATA--not PATA. It's a Dell computer, they don't seem to give away a single extra port on their motherboards. I'm surprised it came with even a free PCI slot.

I've asked: How much slower is USB than SATA or PATA for HDD?

I don't know a power supply model number or anything. It came with a cheap Dell computer. There are no molex power connectors because the computer came with no such drives. The DVD drive is SATA.

I've found adapters, but they go the wrong way: old power supply to new drive.

This was for a one-time bulk file copy to retire/repurpose the old disk drives and I'm now done. But, I would be interested to know if anyone found such an adapter.

Is ATA the same as IDE/PATA or SATA?

I was taking a look at a HDD and I found a document (from Toshiba, link: 2.5-Inch SATA HDD mq01abdxxx) that says:

Drive interface: Serial ATA, Revision 2.6 / ATA-8

I know that SATA uses SATA interface and ATA uses IDE interface. Then: Why is it using different stuff in the same sentence? An HDD has SATA interface OR IDE interface but not both at the same time.

What type of 2.5" drive is this, is it ide?

Trying find out what type of drive I have in my laptop.

Is just died and I'm keen to find out what sort it is ?

Heres a photo...

In BIOS, what does "SATA Controller" with the ability to select either IDE or RAID mean?

In my BIOS, I've got a setting called "SATA Controller" that can select either IDE or RAID.

It's currently set to IDE.

What does this setting mean, and will bad things happen if I change it?

My motherboard is an Asus P5VD2-MX if that helps.

Do I get any performance boost with an IDE to SATA adapter?

I picked up a barebones PC kit the other day so that I could get a speed boost and still use my old hard drives/DVD drives, etc.

I currently have two IDE drives and unfortunately the new motherboard only has 1 IDE head to plug into (and I fear I have now showed my age on my last home built PC). Since I need to keep a functioning DVD-RW drive, this means that I will have to lose one of the hard drives.

However, there is a SATA port on the motherboard and I saw that they sell adapters that will allow the IDE drive to plug in and function off the IDE port.

It isn't critical that I have both drives up and running, but if I can get some extra boost out of running the old hard drive through the SATA port, I could see it being worthwhile. Will I get any kind of performance boost by installing the old hard drive this way?

5 x 3GB drives and 4 x 1500GB drive best raid setup?

I am building a file server my plan is the have the Operating system on one raid partition and the data storage on another partition.

I currently have 5 x 3GB IDE drives that i would like to put the operating system on theses drives are old but that doesnt matter to me at the moment i have a ton of them so for this raid partition i would probably want to be able to pull out dead a drive and rebuild the array.

My file partition is going to consist of 4 x 1.5TB SATA drives I would like the maximum storage with some redundancy.

Any suggestions to which Raid level i should use would be greatly appreciated and if you could also suggest a PCI or PCI-e raid controller to handle theses arrays.

Thanks in Advance,

Zen_Silence

Why is HDD in a DVD-ROM slot slower on Lenovo 3000 laptop?

So I'm about to upgrade my laptop (Lenovo 3000 N100, 0768-49G), got my SATA HDD caddy for the DVD-ROM slot, but whenever I'm putting an HDD or SSD into it, the read speed falls to only 30 MByte/s, whereas the same drive put into the regular HDD slot scores over 130 MBytes/s (max. possible on this old PATA bus). I'm testing from a Live-CD using Ubuntu's "disk utility".

I've got the latest BIOS (Phoenix 2.06, 61ET37WW), it looks like some extremely cut version of the original bios - I can't change anything hardware related (like AHCI/IDE mode for the SATA controller), the only available settings are "quite boot", "enable modem" and "enable legacy usb".

So my question is: why is the SATA port in the DVD slot so much slower? Is there any way to get the same speed (130+ MB/s) on both ports so I can use SSD and HDD in parallel?

Thanks!

UPDATE 1 I may have found something relevant in dmesg:

[    1.390619] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x1f0 ctl 0x3f6 bmdma 0x18b0 irq 14
[    1.390626] ata2: PATA max UDMA/100 cmd 0x170 ctl 0x376 bmdma 0x18b8 irq 15
[    1.556337] ata1.00: ATA-9: Samsung SSD 840 Series, DXT06B0Q, max UDMA/133
[    1.556345] ata1.00: 234441648 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
[    1.561011] ata2.00: ATA-8: WDC WD7500BPKT-00PK4T0, 01.01A01, max UDMA/133
[    1.561018] ata2.00: 1465149168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)
[    1.561027] ata2.00: limited to UDMA/33 due to 40-wire cable
[    1.564333] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133

what's that "40-wire cable"?

IDE/PATA high-speed hard drive dock

I frequently need to access bare drives for backups and need a quick, high-speed way to deal with them.

There are a multitude of SATA hard drive docks (for example), but I have a lot of IDE/PATA (hereafter "IDE") drives that I would like to be able to use similarly. There are IDE-to-SATA adapters so you can plug your IDE hard drive into a SATA port, so I don't see any reason why you couldn't use the same technology to have a native dock, yet none seems to exist.

Now, I'm aware that 3.5" IDE drives do not have a specification for the layout of the connector, and therefore can't be slapped into a dock the same way a SATA drive could, but 2.5" PATA drives do. In fact, I'm not terribly interested in supporting 3.5" drives. It would be nice, but I deal with them far less frequently than 2.5" drives.

Also, I'd very much like for the connection to the computer be faster than USB, preferably eSATA, I don't want to be spending time mounting a drive inside an enclosure, I don't want bare drives lying around with a cable hanging off of them, and I'd prefer a single dock rather than two.

What seems like the ideal solution to me would be a regular SATA→eSATA dock and some sort of screwless adapter for IDE drives, but I'm open to any suggestions, regardless of my stated preferences, but which are, in some sort of order of preference:

1. high-speed (faster than USB, at least)
2. holder for drive (not just a cable)
3. no complicated enclosure
4. support for 3.5" IDE drives
5. single dock

Updates:

Here's a 3.5" IDE to 3.5" SATA docking adapter that could be part of the solution. Weird. I figured that would be the impossible part.

I was hoping to find something like this 2.5" to 3.5" SATA chassis that would take a 44-pin IDE drive internally.

It looks like the Vantec EZ Swap EX comes awfully close. It has its own bay dock, but it looks like the SATA ports on the back are spaced properly, even if they're not aligned quite properly. Unfortunately, the proper position is at the very edge of the drive, which means that the docks' connectors are at the very edge of their recesses, which means there's no way to fit it in there.

Master/slave PATA setup not recognized

I have two Seagate barracuda 7200.10 500 GB drives pulled from an old Lacie Big Disk Extreme. I have been using them both in a Dell Dimension 4600 in a master slave configuration, (one by default has a jumper as master and the other has no jumper as a slave. This is confirmed by this article)

I inherited an Optiplex gx620 and was attempting to set up the same configuration, but I have been having difficulties. When each drive is connected separately as master, they are detected and work perfectly. However, when connected in a Master/Slave relationship, neither are detected. This machine is equipped with the "cable select" feature, so I attempted that jumper configuration on the drives, but I had the exact same result. I have tried 3 different cables and nothing makes any difference.

Does anyone have any idea why this configuration isn't working?

Additionally, it should be noted that the PATA cable was originally connected to a DVD drive, and I'm reasonably sure that the original harddrive was on SATA with no PATA hd at all. I have changed the settings in the bios (A11) to disable all SATA, and enabled the two PATA connections.

Update: For my own sanity, I plugged both drives back into the original dimension 4600 and configured them as Master/Slave on a single IDE connector. Both drives were recognized and booted fine. I moved the exact same setup over to the new computer and it still didn't work. As a result, I'm inclined to believe this is a problem with the motherboard or BIOS.

Is there any sort of setting on the board that would cause this problem?

Can a USB/IDE/SATA adapter be flaky?

I use USB/IDE/SATA converters a lot and on the two that I have now, I sometimes get errors copying files to drives.

It only happens when I'm copying big files to the drive (big can mean as little as 100MB, I think it happens more often with bigger files - 300MB or more), and basically the copy will fail and I'll get one or more error messages about "Delayed write failed."

But if I disconnect the drive and re-connect it, I'll usually be able to continue. (The file that was being copied will be corrupt, but otherwise the drive is fine.)

I just noticed a new type of flakiness: the data transfer rate can vary widely. I copied one set of files (5x300MB files) and it took 10+minutes, then I copied another set (approx. the same sizes) and it took less than a minute.

I haven't done systematic testing, the other things I'm doing on my laptop at the same time might have some impact, and I haven't cross-checked the two adapters I have and the 3 hard drives I'm working with to see if there's a pattern. I'm more wondering if anyone else has seen anything like this.

Identify if optical drive in my laptop is SATA or PATA in Windows 7

I never thought this will be soo difficult but without opening up my laptop how do I identify if the dvd drive in my laptop is SATA or not.

And incase its SATA then is it SATA - II?

I am ok with installing 3rd party utilities to find this out.