windows: on primary PATA or SCSI SATA?

[zakimort]

Hello all. I was reading your forums these last days to see if someone had posted with a similar problem, but didn't find anything. I hope you can help me with it. It is not really a problem, more of a doubt that I have.
Few months ago I decided to buy a second hard drive, and since my motherboard support SATA I got a 300GB SATA. My primary disk is a PATA 160GB. At the moment I have windows installed on the SATA one, but I was wondering if this is the best configuration, since the PATA is the primary one. What do you think? As you can see I am no big expert, and your opinion would be really appreciated. Tonight I am formatting the lot but need to know which configuration will give me more speed.

Thank you all in advance for any answer you can give me.

[Hagar]

It does not make much difference. The 'Primary' designation does not mean much, it is just an old style of PATA notation.
A SATA disk is usually a little bit faster than PATA, but not by much.

[saphalline]

What chipset does your mobo have? This can have a big impact on just how easy (or difficult) it will be to install Windows on the SATA hard drive. Older chipsets technically supported SATA, but not natively, requiring you to load drivers for the SATA controller during the Windows install. New chipsets are totally SATA-native, so no extra work is required.

Generally speaking, SATA hard drives perform better than their PATA counterparts, so it's ideal to boot off SATA. But again, this can also depend heavily on your mobo's chipset.

[Paul Komski]

The way SATA's perform has quite a lot to do with the chipsets that control them as well as the drives themselves. In my experience they are always faster than comparable PATAs (size and rpm and buffer) and although immediate disk access may not be noticeable faster they do outperform PATAs by a considerable margin when using sustained disk transfers of data such as when creating or restoring disk images. Given the choice on a modern mobo I would go with SATA evey time.

He He - good to see that I am more or less in sync with Saphalline on this one ;)

[zakimort]

thank you for the replies.

Actually it was a pain in the neck to get the SATA to accept to be the boot disk. When I bought it I thought the process would be straightforward but it wasn't, at least not for one [like me] who always was afraid to touch the hardware. Disk was recognised, but ignored in the booting process. Anyway at the end used maxblast [both disks are maxtor] and all went well.
I was expecting a better performance in terms of speed but really didn't see any improvement, actually games seem slower [but maybe it is just my imagination!]. This is why I thought maybe it wasn't such a good idea to switch boot disk in the first place.

These are the specs:

AMD Athlon XP 2800+
Board: ASUS A7N8X2.0 deluxe
1024 Megabytes Installed Memory

[saphalline]

Oh, that's why. Yeah, take the easier road and just boot off the PATA hard drive. The AthlonXP era never had native SATA support - it was too early. You've got a SATA 1.0 controller chip built into the mobo sitting on the PCI bus. SATA performance is going to be anemic on that vs modern native SATA 300 chipsets. You're better off using the SATA hard drive for storage.

[zakimort]

Thank you very much saphalline. I wish I knew all this stuff before I bought this disk, luckily it was quite cheap so no big loss, just a bit of aggravation. It was really a good idea to ask first before formatting... Will go back to old configuration then, with windows on the PATA.

[Hagar]

... New chipsets are totally SATA-native ...
What is actually the difference between native and not native? Any examples?

[Paul Komski]

Saphalline will know the detail for sure but from recollection the original SATA-PATA chips were bridged together on the mobo and usually presented as a SCSI interface. Modern (native unbridged) SATA chips behave directly as ATA devices in their own right.

[saphalline]

Non-native SATA is any SATA controller (in the logical sense) that is not built directly into the chipset. If SATA functionality and PATA emulation is not built into the chipset, then it is considered non-native SATA.

To the user, this means that any SATA hard drive that cannot have Windows installed on it as easily as a PATA hard drive is connected to a non-native SATA controller.

In your case, the SATA controller chip is on the mobo, but not built into the chipset. The SATA controller chip is connected to the chipset via the standard PCI bus, making it effectively the same as a PCI SATA controller card. Because of this, Windows cannot automatically be installed in a "normal" fashion. You must do the "press F6 to install third party RAID controller" thing, which is annoying and can cause issues if this driver is ever lost in the future. Modern chipsets with built-in SATA and SATA-PATA emulation do not suffer from this problem. Windows will see SATA hard drives as easily as PATA, and will be installed normally without any extra effort.

This is what native SATA means.

[Hagar]

Thanks. But there must be something more to the "press F6 to install ..." issue. About a year ago I was installing XP (SP2) on a brand new Dell PC, and found I had to install the SATA driver from floppy. Do not remember the exact details, but the chipset was either 875 or 915.
Both ICH5 and ICH6 should be considered native?
Another thing was that I still could use Ghost 2003 (DOS floppy) without problems. That really lost my grip on understanding why Windows install could not see the disk without a driver.

[Paul Komski]

DOS and the DOS-based OSes will "believe" what the BIOS tells them and not poll all the hardware during the boot-up phase and Windows9x will use virtual drivers. They can thus "see" and deal with hard drives "normally" as long as other factors such as large hard drives are not outside the remit of whatever version is running.

If F6 has to be used for an NT-based OS then drivers must be supplied because these OSes will poll the hardware beyond just the BIOS-based boot devices and confusion set in when the same drive or drives are found on say a SCSI interface. This can result in a couple of problems; either no "findable" volume is reported or, in the case of hardware RAID sets, all the drives in the same single array may be reported. When this happens the array will be broken as soon as anything is written to an individual drive in the array.

I suspect that this overlap between what the BIOS reports and what the OSes (not forgetting the various Linux distros and versions) find will not be resolved for some time yet - but the more modern the BIOS the more likely it is that SATAs will behave just as PATAs have done in recent history. As an aside I wonder just how modern the chipsets and BIOS are on a "modern" Dell.

So Ghost working on a DOS floppy is not surprising if you consider you could fdisk the very first SATAs even though you would need F6 to install WinNT.

[Hagar]

Thanks Paul, think I understand it now. DOS can only use BIOS, while NT switches to NTLDR early on and from then on does not use BIOS but must use its own drivers.

[saphalline]

I have seen a number of OEM systems that use modern chipsets yet mess up the BIOS to the point where an OS doesn't see the SATA hard drives. This is not a limitation of the chipset, but rather the OEM that dropped the ball on writing the BIOS.

Yet another reason I discount OEM machines as being upgradeable in any way.

[Hagar]

If BIOS cannot see the drive there would be no way to boot from it.
But in the case of that Dell, DOS could see the drive through BIOS.

[saphalline]

If BIOS cannot see the drive there would be no way to boot from it.Ah, but I have seen it done on the OEM's! The drives aren't reported in the BIOS because the system assumes they are there. Totally custom configured BIOS routines are built into these annoying beasts - these proprietary systems will not work with any other hardware! And because the drives aren't reported normally, standard diagnostic boot tests don't work! Yet somehow they boot into Windows with all original hardware. Hmmm...