Best HD performance Setup - 965P-S3

[gerwen]

I'm a little confused by the options of my Gigabyte 965P-S3.
I have a Seagate 320GB Sata II drive as my main boot drive. It's plugged into port 0 on the ICH8 Sata controller (After reading some benchmarks online, it seems the Intel controller outperforms the Gigabyte one for Sata HD's, which is why i have my Sata drive plugged in there.)

I also have a 60 GB EIDE drive and a DVD writer plugged in as master/slave on the IDE controller.

Everything seems to be working fine, but i'm not sure if it's the best performing setup or not.

I tried setting the bios option Onboard Sata IDE Ctrl Mode to AHCI which from the description would give the best performance from my Sata drive, but my Ide devices disappeared. Is this setting for just the Gigabyte Sata, and not the Intel ICH8 Sata?

After reviewing the mobo manual again, I'm thinking now that i need to have Sata port 0-3 Native mode Set to Enabled (if it isn't already, i'm not at home atm.) To have the ICH8 controller running at max performance. I also need to leave Onboard Sata IDE Ctrl Mode Set to IDE so that it will properly use my IDE devices.

Am i getting this right? Anyone care to give a better performing setup? Added note: i did remove the jumper on the Sata drive to allow its full capability.

Thanks for any help.

 

[willtriv]

it really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is driver preformance and having a dma mode that can push more than 100M/s. If your not getting DMA mode 5 or higher for ide devices and you don't have the specific intel chipset driver and w/e other sata drivers you need your going to comsume mass amounts of cpu for simple file io. sata1 vs sata2 makes nil of a difference. One last thing in sata that does help sometimes i command queueing. If one controller supports ncq/tcq and the other doesn't (and your drives are sata2 or have ncq) than ncq is mildly faster and may prolong drive life but it's yet to prove useful to me.