Burner as primary master?

[Ronin13]

I've just build my first system with a SATA disk.

This PC only has 1 optical drive (a DVD burner/combo drive) and a single SATA disk.

Since I'm not using any other IDE drives, I put the burner on the primary IDE channel, as master.

The SATA disk is listed in the BIOS as being the 'Third Master'.

Is this all as it should be?

 

[Jeff7]

Sounds right to me. SATA chips seem to connect to the southbridge as an external device; the "normal" PATA IDE controller seems to be more directly hooked in. The BIOS sees the PATA Pri-master as the first device, Sec-master as the second, and anything else after that is third, fourth, etc.
If you disable the onboard controller completely, then I'd assume that the external primary master would become the first.

 

[Ronin13]

Thanks for your reply!

I'm in the process of installing drivers, etc.

First I installed the Intel Chipset Inf Update Program (downloaded from Intel's site, not the version that came with the motherboard.)

After that I tried installing the Intel Application Accelerator Driver, but both the one I had downloaded as well as the one on the motherboard disk are only for RAID setups.

Since the rig only has 1 hard drive, I can't use this software?

Is there another IAA version for single drives/non RAID setups on the i875 chipset?

Or am I better off without the IAA driver?

Btw, this is the setup:
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe
P4c 3.0
2x512 Kingston PC3200 RAM
Samsung SP80 160GB, 8MB buffer, SATA drive
Plextor PX 712A
In an Antec SLK 2650 BQE case
On a Samsung 173t LCD monitor