I have an Asus P5B Deluxe MOBO. It has 6 SATA ports, 4 red and 2 are black in color. It says to plug the primary ( boot )hard disc drive to one of the red plugs and and "data" disc's on the black plugs. I do have my HDD plugged into one of the red connector's and it works fine, but I'm confused about using a SATA DVD drive, do I plug the optical drive into one of the red plug's or one of the 2 black ones that say data disc?
Thanks;
Dougie
It shouldn't make any difference what sata port you use!
It shouldn't make any difference what sata port you use!
Thanks, I was just wondering why they are a different color and some are called data disc port?
It's usually for just telling them apart really. You may find that the black ones are either raid ports or non raid ports but don't worry about that, you don't need to use raid.
It's usually for just telling them apart really. You may find that the black ones are either raid ports or non raid ports but don't worry about that, you don't need to use raid.
And I assume that the red and black port's are controlled by a different controller chip?
Yup, that's what I think, but I can't be absolutely sure without a technical manual on the motherboard though!
And I assume that the red and black port's are controlled by a different controller chip?
The reason I was asking is because back when this MOBO was new I was using SATA DVD drive's and had a lot of problems with them. I tried several Plextors and LG drives. They were reading a lot of errors and would constantly go into PIO mode. I was in the process of ripping my CD collection to my hard drive when errors started showing up and eventually corrupting my music files. I re-formatted a couple of times but still had problems with the drives. The computer store where I buy my computer parts had it for awhile but could not solve the problem or come up with any answers. So I switched to using 2 IDE drives, a Plextor PX-870A and an LG. I have since ripped over 110 Gb of music with no errors. I recently wanted to get 2 new DVD drives and thought I would start using SATA instead as thre are many more SATA drives on the market than IDE drives.
Perhaps flashing their firmware will help!?!
What version of windows are you using?
Perhaps flashing their firmware will help!?!
What version of windows are you using?
Firmware has always been upgraded to the latest. I'm using WinXP Pro sp3
The thing is, when XP was written sata optical drives simply didn't exist. Perhaps upgrading to windows 7 might be an idea!
The thing is, when XP was written sata optical drives simply didn't exist. Perhaps upgrading to windows 7 might be an idea!
You might have a point there because I do know that the issue with my SATA optical drives going into the PIO mode is an XP problem according to what I have read on the internet. Whenever it reads several errors on the disc, Xp sets it to the PIO mode but on order to attempt to read the data accurately, problem is, is that it wont return to the Ultra DMA mode and it's a pain to re-set. They normally read at DMA mode 5.
I know that Xp was written before SATA optical drives but a person would think that with the release of sp2 and sp3 these issues would have been taken care of lol!!
I have been wanting to upgrade to Win 7 but have to decide if I want to upgrade this computer or build a newer one.
Provided your current system has 1gig of ram or more, it should work fine with windows 7. You can also check it out at the microsoft website to see how it scores for windows 7.
Sata didn't exist when SP2 was written, sata1 existed when SP3 was written. Sata2 has never reall been fully adressed via a service pack for XP.
Provided your current system has 1gig of ram or more, it should work fine with windows 7. You can also check it out at the microsoft website to see how it scores for windows 7.
Sata didn't exist when SP2 was written, sata1 existed when SP3 was written. Sata2 has never reall been fully adressed via a service pack for XP.
My Seagate SATA Hdd doesn't have any issues so I don't think you are totally right that XP has SATA issues in general, just with SATA optical drives it seems. I was wondering about my ASUS P5B-Deluxe as it's getting to be quite old now.
My Asus K8V-X socket 754 mobo is much older and windows 7 works a treat on it so...
Socket 754 is a single core 64bit AMD. It's so old that it has just 2 sata1 ports on it (as well as the usual 2 ide channels).
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