help

[gasan]

can i know what is sata as ide in gigabyte bios and why the sata is configered to ide so in my experience sata and ide are defferent controller can someone explain this to me

[Psycho101]

Re: help

SATA and IDE are completely identical. The difference you are thinking of is the "IDE Ports" vs the SATA ports. They look very different.

The IDE port should really be called "Parallel ATA port" or "PATA". The only difference between the two interfaces is that SATA communicates serially down the BUS and PATA communicates in a parallel fashion. Apart form that, all the basic ATA commands etc are the same. The only additions to SATA are a command to flush the buffer directly to disk (for hot swapping/removing drives with the PC on) and for NCQ (Native Command Queueing).

All the IDE/SATA options does is lets you choose how each SATA port is assigned an IRQ and to choose if hot swapping and NCQ are available to use. In Legacy IDE mode the BIOS assigns a fixed IRQ to each port that can not then be shared around with other components and managed by the Operating System. In Native mode, the OS is able to assign IRQ's to the drive dynamically. This is why some DOS disk utilities need the ports to be in Legacy IDE, because without that mode the ports have no IRQ and the program can't access the drives.

The major difference between PATA (using the "IDE ports") and SATA is of course band width. PATA is capped at 133MB/s. This requires you to use an 80 conductor ribon cable, containing the standard amount of data connections, plus 40 insulating grounded wires to prevent cross talk/interference. SATA connects with much thinner serial leads that have only 7 wires in them. They are also usually mildly shielded and less susceptible to cross talk/interference as long as the cable length is kept to the recommended length or less. SATA can move data at a theoretical maximum of 3Gbps, much more than a PATA interface. SATA 6Gbps is now available too, but due to limited numbers of PCIE lanes connected to the integrated mobo versions and add in cards, they don't perform as fast as they should at the moment. This will change as the standard grows in popularity.

IDE mode for SATA ports is the most compatible mode. For certain Operating Syatems including some versions of XP (depends which service pack is used/slipstreamed) a driver is needed at first instalation, similar to how you have to supply a RAID driver. Without thi driver the install will fail. If you use IDE mode to install the OS and then switch to AHCI without first tweaking the registry to force AHCI drivers to load, the PC will freeze/crash/restart at the "Loading Windows" screen.

***EDIT*** An excellent article to read regarding SATA and the differences between it and PATA can be found here: http://www.answers.com/topic/serial-ata?cat=technology