Esata as a slave drive?

[justyermama]

I am just learning about computers so please forgive me any ignorance. I have just picked up a computer from down the street that has a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-USH motherboard. I had an external sata drive that I plugged into the Esata port on the back. It is running on the same channel as the DVD-burner and the bios has configured it as a slave drive. Is that a problem? Will that slow anything down? And can it be changed? Thank you.

 

[popatim]

This is telling you that the drive is in the seconds port of the sata controller which is set in a mode that emulates IDE. While this is not really a problem for HDD in most cases the newer drives and SSD's can take advantage of the features of AHCI mode for a speed boost. One of the features of AHCI is the ability to hot plug drives (notice you might want this with an external drive) so I suggest rebooting into the bios and changing the mode of the external port to AHCI and while you are in there see what mode the other sata ports are in but do not change them at this point.

 

[justyermama]

Thanks for your quick response. The last computer I had, had an intel 865g chipset, and I think the bios was last updatable in 2004. Not sure. At any rate, after going into the bios, I am still somewhat confused. In addition to the esata drive, internally the computer had a western digital 320 gig hard drive and I installed 2 drives each with a terabyte, and then a 300 gigabyte IDE drive as well. I wasn't really considering a raid configuration. I was going to dual boot and install two operating systems on the 300 gig drives and keep the data separate on the tb drives. And then I was going to use the Esata drive to do back ups. Not sure. I did make two changes in the bios. I enabled the IDE channel and changed the onboard chip on sata port 4 & 5 to "sata type" from IDE. I'm a little embarrassed but I don't really KNOW what I'm doing and I'm not sure how to configure things. I noticed that the SATA drives were in AHCI mode (before the option available for port 4 & 5 to be changed from IDE). Not sure if this is clear. But any ideas or information would be helpful to me. Thank you!