Explanation of Mobo Features, Please.

[VinnieColaiuta]

 

[VinnieColaiuta]

Woops............pushed enter instead of tab. Sorry.

I would like to know what the following terms mean when talking about mobos:

ATA

SATA

RAID

What is the purpose of each of these?

 

[Peter]

ATA and SATA are your usual hard disk attachment interfaces, old and new (parallel and (S)erial cable).

RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives, essentially grouping a bunch of hard disk drives together for improved system reliability and/or better throughput.

 

[DieHardware]

Before you decide on a SATA HDD make sure the MB's SATA controller isn't on the slow PCI bus (cough**NF2**cough).

 

[Jeff H]

DieHardware, building on what you said re SATA controller on the PCI bus, if one had a board w/ both a Silicon Image onboard SATA controller and an Intel ICH5/R onboard controller, and wanted to set up a single drive on SATA, would the better choice be the Intel solution? FYI board is an EPoX EP-4PDA2+. It's really loaded, with a HighPoint 372 RAID controller, a Silcon Image (3112A) SATA controller and via the Intel 865PE chipset an ICH5/R SATA controller.

Right now I'm running a single ATA133 drive off the HPT controller. I'm considering getting a larger capacity SATA drive and connecting it to the Intel controller. Will that be the better choice, over the Silicon Image controller?

TIA,

Jeff

 

[DieHardware]

For one drive it probably doesn't matter but any more and I'd put the HDD's on the integrated SATA southbridge controller and all ODD's on the integrated southbridge IDE controller and then any remaining H/ODD's on the controllers that are on the PCI bus.