IDE Controllers on A7V133

[Guest]

I am a novoice computer assembler and I have a question regarding the IDE controller setup on the A7V133 motherboard. Are all four IDE channels active and do all four provide ATA100 support? I do not plan to use the Raid 0 feature so if I have two identical IBM UDMA 100 drives which set of IDE channels am I best to connect them to? I also plan to connect a DVD reader and A CD writer. Which channels would these be best to connect to? Would the drives autodetect on initial startup regardless of which IDE channels I connect to and is the boot drive configurable in BIOS? Also, if I added an older hard drive where would it be best to connect it? I am wondering what the optimal configuration would be. Is it worthwhile using the Promise ATA100 controller or should I stick with the VIA controller IDE channels? I presume those channels nearer the Cmos battery on this board are controlled by the VIA chipset? Your help is greatly appreciated.

John

 

[rfh1234]

I have this board and noticed that it said ata not enabled no device is installed when I put in the blue slot , same side as floppy plugs into and when i moved it to the other blue slot, on left it now says enabled and shows mydrive (3rd screen during bootup) so i would say that ata100/66 is the 2 slots to left, all else like ata33 or cd drives burner etc put on right. thats how mine is and when i switched it that way it got much quicker. But I am just a dummy who put together his first computer NOT an expert, just my findings

 

[dmcmahon]

I'm not an expert but here goes:

The two IDE connectors near the floppy connector are the ones you get out-of-the-box from the VIA chipset. These are probably the best ones for a "default" setup, and I think also the least likely to give trouble if you put the boot drive on one of them. With the A7V133 these controllers do support ATA100 - it was only the older A7V board that was limited to ATA66.

The other IDE connectors are controlled by the Promise controller. By default it runs as an additional IDE controller but you can enable Raid0 with a jumper. It's best if you have twin drives for the Raid0 mode, and in fact if you have twins and they're not needed for boot, it might even be better from a performance point of view to use the Raid0 mode. You still have the same disk capacity, only your twins will function as a single, larger, faster disk.

If you are not using the Promise controller, you can disable it in the BIOS settings and it saves time during the boot-up (it will just skip the step where it detects that there are no devices connected). The OSes may still assign it an IRQ, however, but since there are no devices there it won't actually conflict with anything.

As far as hooking up the two disks and two removable drives, I'm interested to hear what advice you get. I have a similar setup except I have a Zip drive instead of a second optical-media drive. I like to have my two hard disks on different IDE channels so they each get their own interrupt. The hard disks are much much faster than either of the removable disks, so I put the two removable disks as slaves on the two IDE channels. I put the CD drive as a slave on the secondary IDE channel so that in situations where I am using the main (boot) hard drive and the CD, they each have their own interrupt (this is the common mode when I'm running games). My CD drive is a burner, so I make sure that I burn from an image on the main drive, again so that during the operation I'm always transferring from one IDE chain/IRQ to the other.

I don't know whether any of this matters or not, and I've sometimes wondered if it would be better to put both the hard drives on one IDE and both the slow removables on the other.