Does location/order of Sata devices effect system performance

trinaz said:

Back in the IDE days...I believe the items and/or types of IDE devices on either IDE cable/channel would effect system performance. In other words if you have a fast HDD as a master and a CD player as the slave on the dame cable/IDE channel..system and/or drive performance

Does the same issue effect Sata drives/types and the order these are connected to the Sata ports on the MB ?

Also..in bios setup..whats the difference/advantage/disadvantage to running Sata drives as IDE or AHCI ?

Thanks, TR

SHort answer, no!
The SATA connection is direct connect into the mother board. There is no interface to slow down bus speeds.

Running a SATA drive as AHCI allows you to hot swap the drive, if you have a hot swap bay in your case. It also allows drives to use Native Command Queuing if the drive is equipped with it. Some say there is a performance increase to AHCI and NCQ, but when I converted my drives, I really didn't see any boost from it. YMMV.

One thing about SATA drives. The older SATA1 drives are slower than the newer SATA2 drives, and the SATA3's that are coming out now. It's just the interface between the disk and the motherboard. There's no problem mixing them, but you may be confused if you do, and wonder why one drive is so much slower than the others. Most SATA2 drives have a jumper setting on them that runs them at half transfer speed (SATA1) for compatibility with older motherboards. It's the first thing to check if you think your drive is too slow and you know for a fact it's a SATA2. I've seen the jumper come that way from the factory on occasion, which is really weird.

One thing to keep in mind is the fact that SOME boards have 2 (or more) SATA controllers. They may also have different drivers. my P55-UD4P has 2 controllers....so if you have one drive connected to one controllewr and another to a different controller, you may be running one drive in IDE and another in AHCI.

This is something to be aware of so you don't have any surprises. I would just run in IDE unless you need hot swap capabilities. Good luck

nate42nd said:

I would just run in IDE unless you need hot swap capabilities. Good luck

Best advice in this thread. +1