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Primary SATA Channel 1?

N

nikko

Senior member
I have a Dell Dimension desktop that is running two 250 GB hard drives in RAID as a single 500 GB drive. When I boot up of late, I get the following error message: ?Warning: Dell's disk monitoring system has detected that drive channel 1 on the primary SATA controller is operating outside of normal specifications." I want to replace the drive, but I'm not sure which one drive channel 1 is. How can I check? Is the other one drive channel 2 or drive channel 0?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
 
Open up the case, and look for the SATA connections. In very small lettering, depending on how many SATA connections you have, they will have the channel listed on the motherboard next to the port. Always starts with SATA 0 and runs up to SATA 3 (for a 4 SATA port MB). Once you find the one listed as SATA 1, follow the cable to the drive. Some SATA controllers have software drivers that can tell you this info without physically looking on the MB, but with Dell's I doubt you will find such a thing.
 
If nothing else, the RAID BIOS setup might give you the serial number. The RAID monitoring software that should be available (probably Intel's Matrix RAID drivers) should also be able to provide serial numbers and also tell you I think whether the drive is functioning normally. It's likely the SMART status that is bad.)

If even that doesn't work, unplug one and see if you get the error. 🙂

Also I don't know if perhaps Dell has different specifications, but most mainboards are labelled with SATA1 to SATA4, they don't start with 0, but the BIOS probably does start at 0. So "drive channel 1" possibly indicates the second ATA channel.

Very confusing. Despite SATA only being one drive per channel, they are laid out in groups of two in many BIOSes. So you get SATA 0 primary and SATA 0 secondary channel, and SATA 1 primary and secondary. This is because each controller in the chipset is for 2 channels.

In any case, I believe that this is probably indicating that the drive on SATA2 port is the one that's bad. The primary controller is for SATA1 and SATA2, which correspond to channels 0 and 1 on the primary controller. SATA3 and SATA4 would be channels 0 and 1 on a secondary controller.
 
Download, install, and run Belarc Advisor (Free) and it will tell you everything you need to know on every piece of hardware. It will also show you how your SATA ports are being used.

BA

BTW - most Users Manuals have a mobo layout that numbers the ports.
 
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