I am concerned about all SATA installation on G33...

[taisingera]

I am just about ready to buy the Gigabyte G33-DS2R but I plan on using 2 SATAII hard drives and a SATA optical (no RAID). This board has RAID and AHCI (for NCQ & eSATA). I do know that I need to choose AHCI or not before the XP install and install the driver with F6 (still have a spare floppy), but is it true that the SATA optical won't work once in Windows due to AHCI being enabled? Also, if I don't enable AHCI or RAID on this mobo, will I be limited to only 4 of the six SATA ports?

 

[taisingera]

anybody? it seems like the board makers screw us either way. you get a SATA ODD but you can't use AHCI for hard drives because the ODD may have problems. With these new boards and the JMicron chips for IDE, they aren't good and everyone says to stay away. So the eSATA bracket with this mobo seems useless now. The only thing I have that's close to it is an external enclosure that is only SATA (not eSATA) that I run off of USB.