CPU/Mobo Best way to connect multiple hdds to mb

[anandkrishnantc]

Hi all,
i need to know the optimum way to connect multiple sata hdds to motherboard which is having multiple sata ports to connect. One suggestion i got is to connect bootable hdd to sata and other in serial connected to another ide port. Will this speed up the booting and shut down? Any suggestions?
anand

 

[luster]

how will you connect sata hdd to ide port ?
multiple sata hdds->multiple sata ports on mb. this is the only way

or is it , you having sata and ide(parallel ata) hdds and which should be the boot drive, sata or ide ?

 

[CA50]

how will you connect sata hdd to ide port ?
multiple sata hdds->multiple sata ports on mb. this is the only way

or is it , you having sata and ide(parallel ata) hdds and which should be the boot drive, sata or ide ?

i don't think there is any other way to connect your HDD. If you have sata HDD, then just connect it to the SATA ports.

 

[anandkrishnantc]

I have only sata HDDs. So should I connect the boot disk separately to one port and all remaining serially connected to another sata?
The worry is if I connect all separately, will it seek all the disk to find out which is to boot from?
If yes, then it will slow down the booting process.

 

[ALPHA17]

I have only sata HDDs. So should I connect the boot disk separately to one port and all remaining serially connected to another sata?
The worry is if I connect all separately, will it seek all the disk to find out which is to boot from?
If yes, then it will slow down the booting process.

Same case here, I have 3x SATA hard-drives + 1x SATA optical drive --

• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 320GB x2 (configured in RAID 0 and used as the boot partition)
• Western Digital Green Edition 1TB x1 (used as a data-dump)
• LG OEM optical drive x1

My motherboard is the ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO and it has 5 SATA ports and 1 xIDE (legacy) port, I can configure these as follows --

• All SATA ports in IDE mode;
• SATA 1 -->3 in RAID, rest in IDE OR AHCI mode;
• SATA 1 -->5 in RAID mode.

I am using the second mode as it allows me to use my smaller drives in a RAID configuration and the rest components are independent of them. Also if I was using the entire system in RAID the 1TB drive would get curtailed to use only ~596GB of its space (thanks to RAID rules), the optical drive will be useless (first-hand experience) as it will be unable to complete any write operations and verify them.

So find out how you can configure your ports first, then decide. And because I have drives in RAID 0 and they have the boot partition the only penalty to start up is how fast they get detected by the RAID controller. No other drives get scanned for boot partitions.

You can change the priority for which hardware you use most for booting [USB devices / optical media / internal drives] in the BIOS to whichever you prefer to further narrow the initial sweep by the BIOS for boot media.

Hope this helps, Cheerio!