Optimal drive connection to SATA controllers? (GA-P35-DS4)

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I have a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4. I have two Seagate SATA hard drives and one SATA DVD burner (Lite-On LH-20A1S).

The motherboard has 8 SATA connectors - 6 on the ICH9R and 2 on a Gigabyte SATA controller. I plugged the two disk drives into a pair of the ICH9R ports (0 and 1), and the DVD drive into the ICH9R port 4.

This is a relatively new machine, and I notice that while verifying a DVD in Nero, simply starting Firefox causes the speed in Nero to drop from 20X to 2X, and the DVD drive would spin way down. My previous machine didn't have that level of interaction between the C Drive and the DVD.

What is the optimal way to connect the drives? Should I spread them out on Ports 0, 2, and 4 on the IC9H? Should I use the Gigabyte controller? If so, does the Gigabyte controller have better performance than the ICH9R (so maybe the C-drive goes there) or just better isolation from interaction (so the DVD would go there)?

 

[The Keeper]

AFAIK which ports you use in a same controller shouldn't matter, but don't quote me on this as I haven't researched about it.

The Gigabyte or any 3rd party SATA/IDE/RAID-controller is connected to the PCIE bus, while integrated controller is connected to the southbridge. In practice this means that the ICH9 controller has less latency than the Gigabyte controller. However, this latency shouldn't even be noticeable because hard drives are much slower than said latency. I don't know if it makes any difference to saturation of PCIE bus if you plug hard drives to a controller that is connected to the PCIE bus, probably not unless you have lots of PCIE devices.

On the other hand, if you have enabled AHCI or RAID mode on the ICH9 controller, you should probably connect the DVD-drive to the Gigabyte controller. I've heard that some optical drives don't behave well on controllers that have AHCI enabled, and RAID mode also enables AHCI. In other words, optical drives probably should be on controllers that are set to IDE-mode. But if your ICH9 controller is set to IDE-mode, it shouldn't matter if the DVD-drive is on the same controller.