What does "IDE Channel" refer to in BIOS POST screen?

[acousticdj]

First new build! So far mostly good. At about 2 weeks old, BIOS stopped detecting bluray drive randomly.

My MOBO:

http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3907&dl=1#ov

has 6 SATA ports numbered 0-5.

The ports are laid out stacked on the the MOBO like this:

0 2 4 (top row)
1 3 5 (bottom row)

My first drive setup was:

SATA PORT 0: SDD with Win7 64 OS
SATA PORT 1: EMPTY

SATA PORT 2: HDD
SATA PORT 3: HDD

SATA PORT 4: EMPTY
SATA PORT 5: BLURAY DRIVE

My buddy recommended this setup so I could add HDDs between the SSD and Bluray without having to move anything. Made sense to me.

However, my BIOS and POST screen shows my 6 SATA ports as 3 "IDE Channels" numbered 0-2 each divided into Master and Slave. Shows them (with drive names) as:

IDE Channel 0 Master: SSD
IDE Channel 0 Slave: None
IDE Channel 1 Master: HDD
IDE Channel 1 Slave: HDD

IDE Channel 2 Master: None
IDE Channel 2 Slave: Bluray

It started "hanging" at POST screen after detecting channels 1 and 2 like it was trying to detect the bluray then it would give up and show "None" and start Windows. The bluray then wouldn't show in Computer or Disk Management.

Sometimes it would detect the bluray at POST but then lose it after sleeping or idling, etc.

Tried switching SATA power connecter from PSU and checked SATA cable and all was fine. So I switched the bluray from SATA port 5 to port 1 to see if it would help but it made the POST hang at detecting IDE Channel 1 instead of Channel 2.

That got me thinking it might be the drive. Unfortunately I've had the drive too long to RMA it so that's not an option.

So I flashed and upgraded the BIOS and that seemed to fix it

Long story, but here's my question:

Why does the MOBO show these ports as "0-5" but the BIOS sees them as 3 channels (as "0-2") each split into Master and Slave?

What would the proper way to set these up be?

I remember "Jumper" and "Cable" select with old IDE ribbon cables. That was easy enough to figure out, but I've got no idea about this SATA stuff.

I've Wiki'd stuff like "IDE Channel" but it turned up little help. I also read the MOBO book cover to cover and it didn't explain much drive setup info.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[mchljrdn]

Just plug and play. You don't really need to worry about it. You can go into the bios to configure boot order, or just start with 0 and go up. Set em all to cable select unless you have a bunch of drives. You can go the old master/slave on the same cable if you want.

 

[lp231]

Plug the blu ray drive into another SATA port.
Change the SATA cable
Change the SATA power cable
Try your blu ray drive in another computer and see if the problem still exist.

 

[mchljrdn]

Try posting with just your primary hdd and the blue ray.

 

[mchljrdn]

Are you running the most recent bios update? Or did you update bios recently?

 

[acousticdj]

Thanks for the replies. Did some research. It's a common issue that 7 loses this drive when it comes out of sleep mode. No one knows if it's 7 or the manufacturer (LG) but they both say it's the other's fault. Anyway, just decided to not let my computer sleep and it doesn't lose the drive anymore. I don't like sleep mode anyway. I just set the monitor to turn off after so long. Thanks.

 

[acousticdj]

To my other question, does anyone know why my BIOS calls my 6 SATA channels "IDE Channels 0, 1 and 2", each split into Master and Slave, when the MOBO labels the ports "SATA 0-5"? Wiki and Google turned up nothing. Thanks.

 

[Outlander_04]

chances are two of your SATA ports are 6g/bits and 4 are 3 G/bits

By changiuing them you have the wrong drivers associated with the different controller chips . The MB had gone in to Legacy IDE mode and wont be running the advanced features it could do . Expect a hard drive performance hit in IDE mode

You could install AHCI drivers manually [ google it ] but the smart option is just put things back as they were