Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R [HELP]

[syrianrue]

i'm building a new computer and have pretty much everything installed and plugged in.

however, i'm really confused about all the SATA connectors on this board.

there's 10 sata connectors total.

6 Sata2 (sata 3 Gb/s connectors, controlled by ICH10R)
2 GSata2 (sata 3 Gb/s connectors, controlled by Gigabyte Sata2)
2 Gsata3 (sata 6 Gb/s connectors, controlled by Marvell 9128)

how should i use and connect the different sata cables to these connectors?
should i connect the sata hard drive to the Sata 3? 'cuz it's faster right?

and what is the difference between the 6 Sata 2 controlled by ICH10R and the 2 Gsata2 controlled by gigabyte sata2?

then there's this ATA serial cable (red)(which looks exactly like a sata cable from my case's front panel.... which sata connector should i plug this into?

if someone could explain the differences between these and how and when to use which sata connector, i would greatly appreciate it.

 

[shortstuff_mt]

You should only use the SATA 6Gb/s connector if you have a SATA 6Gb/s device. Most hard drives don't currently support or benefit from it. If you have less than 6 devices then I would just use the ports than run directly off of the ICH10R chipset. Those ports will offer the best performance.

The red connector is for an external eSATA port on the front of the case. Plug it into one of the SATA connectors run by the ICH10R chipset also. The main system HD should be plugged into the first (usually SATA_0) port.

 

[Crashman]

i'm building a new computer and have pretty much everything installed and plugged in.

however, i'm really confused about all the SATA connectors on this board.

there's 10 sata connectors total.

6 Sata2 (sata 3 Gb/s connectors, controlled by ICH10R)
2 GSata2 (sata 3 Gb/s connectors, controlled by Gigabyte Sata2)
2 Gsata3 (sata 6 Gb/s connectors, controlled by Marvell 9128)

how should i use and connect the different sata cables to these connectors?
should i connect the sata hard drive to the Sata 3? 'cuz it's faster right?

and what is the difference between the 6 Sata 2 controlled by ICH10R and the 2 Gsata2 controlled by gigabyte sata2?

then there's this ATA serial cable (red)(which looks exactly like a sata cable from my case's front panel.... which sata connector should i plug this into?

if someone could explain the differences between these and how and when to use which sata connector, i would greatly appreciate it.

The six ports from the chipset share a high-bandwidth link to the Northbridge, the GSATA2 ports share a single 2.5 gigabit (that's shared, and less than 3) PCIe link, and the GSATA3 ports share a single 5.0 gigabit PCIe 2.0 link.

 

[Guest]

It is very nice to have 6 sata ports on the ICH10r controller, however I want to set up as follows and don't know the best way of connecting either:

4xsata2 1TB harddisks, running in raid 10 (effectively 2TB). This must be on the first raid controller.

1x ssd which would optimally run on ahci mode, as operating system win7 64bit.

I guess I can't have that one on the ICH10r controller sata port-0 with ahci and the raid setup on ports 2-5?

In this case, can I best set up the raid on port 0-4 and the ssd on port 6 (marvel 6GB, eventhough I know its only a 3gb sata 2 ssd disk, but port is supposed to be compattible.
Thanks for your reply!

 

[Crashman]

It is very nice to have 6 sata ports on the ICH10r controller, however I want to set up as follows and don't know the best way of connecting either:

4xsata2 1TB harddisks, running in raid 10 (effectively 2TB). This must be on the first raid controller.

1x ssd which would optimally run on ahci mode, as operating system win7 64bit.

I guess I can't have that one on the ICH10r controller sata port-0 with ahci and the raid setup on ports 2-5?

In this case, can I best set up the raid on port 0-4 and the ssd on port 6 (marvel 6GB, eventhough I know its only a 3gb sata 2 ssd disk, but port is supposed to be compattible.
Thanks for your reply!

You can do that.

 

[Guest]

You can do that.

You can do that.

Thanks for sharing your wisdom crashman! Very much appreciated!
I ve been thinking about my options some more and would like to extend this inquiry.

is there any computer expert out there who can unravell some of the choises below?

Googling learned me that the marvel 9128 controller (G-sata3) is about 10-15% slower for ssd disks than the more evolved ICH10r. Therefore ich10 seems to be best candidate for the ssd disk. On the other hand, I've also read that usually raid 10 is faster for general use than raid 5, except when the ich10r controller is involved. Thus maybe I should choose raid 5. On the other hand, R5 is believed to be less stable and may be buggy (however maybe not with the newest rapid storach technology 9.6 driver version, but this may be just to new to judge). But also that choise has a counter balance on the Raid10 side, which seems to be faster only when cach write back is enabled, but that may compromise system stability. Oh my dear, I am I tripping out on this ***! Is there anyone with some vitamine C out there?

reading some more....
naughty ignorant me,
only raises more questions!
I learned that the OS disk should get port 0 (no idea why, probably shortest acces to CPU?). Okay, that will work, just put everything on the ICH10r controller, afterall it has 6 ports and they're all supposed to have 3GB/s bandwith each, so why not? Or would this bandwith degrade when all 6 ports are in use and would it be better to split the load of communications to cpu etc on 4xdisks in raid on ich10 and 1 ssd on gsata3 controller?

Well there is of course one more insecurity about all this. Inside the F6 version bios of GA-x58-UD7 is expressed that only ports 0,1,2&3 can have native support enabled. So not port 4 and 5. Maybe that will have somehow a negative impact on the raid performance, attatching 2 on port 2+3 with native support and 2 on ports 4&5 without. Or is it only a wrong/old description in the bios, so do they all 6 have native support? Or does this mean that (if I would get better performance from attaching everything to the ICH10r), I should connect the raid on 0-3 and the ssd on port 4?
recently I have connected the raids on ich10 ports 2-5 and ssd on port 0. Pc seems to be not soo fast, but I still have to reinstall, since achi drivers are not preinstalled.

Now I read something interesting and it would be an incredible tweak:
the ICH10 rapid storage techn MAY include the option to use the 4 disks partionally in raid 0 mode and partially in raid 10 mode. Wow, that would also be nice for an OS: 4x seagate Barracuda 7200.12 in Raid 0 may surpass the ssd (280 read and 265 mb/s write) or can be used as a pagefile swap drive. Is it true that relocating the swap onto another physical drive will increase performance, even when this OS drive happens to be the fast OCZ agility2? (yes I know I should protect it from to many write procedures when durability is concerned. Can I use this RST on the GAx58 mainbord, recommended?
It's all dazzling me, I am spinning now for over 7200 rpm.
falling from my chair!

well guys, if you know something that may help me progress in building this new pc, you're very welcome.
In case you have some suggestion on how to upgrade mySelf from 7200 rpm to ssd technology, also welcome :0

 

[Guest]

Oh yeah almost forgot....
the W7 64b OS automatically creates a 100MB system space on first drive, would that be imcrease performace of ssd or should I prevent this partition?

about the general performance raid, I guess 64kb stripe size and 4kb allocation units and 1024 offset is recommendable?

Thanks again!