[jcrsantiago]

I want to know how to hook up my componets so i can get the highest speed possible.

I have 1 raptor sata drive and 2 larger sata drives. I also have 1 IDE hard drive and 2 ide dvd burners.

The mother board has 4 sata ports on one controller. i have 2 sata controllers ( one is on the nforce and the other is a raid) Then ihave the standard 2 Ide ports.

Currently i have the 2 dvd burners connect to the same IDE channel and the hard drive on the last ide channel.

I have disabled the second sata controller with raid and i have all 3 sata drives running off the 1 controller.


Is there a better setup so that i can get a bit more speed?

[jcarle]

For optimal configuration, I'd suggest you transfer what you have on your IDE hard drive and remove it out of the equation. Then install one DVD-RW per IDE channel (one drive per cable). Installing the SATA drives on the southbridge controller like you have now is the best choice for SATA speed. Make sure that you have 32bit transferring enabled in your bios and PCI bus mastering.

[jcrsantiago]

So you agree that i shouldnt use my other sata raid controller? and i currently have my PCI bus disabled since i dont use any pci cards.

[jcarle]

The RAID SATA controller is not bad, it's just that your southbridge controller is faster then the RAID one.

As for PCI bus mastering, the IDE/SATA controllers are still part of the PCI bus even if you don't have any actual PCI cards. PCI Bus Mastering improves performance, with or without PCI cards installed.

[atomizer]

i'd put the 2 large SATA drives (assuming they're identical) on a RAID 0 array and the other 2 wherever else. however, jcarle may have a point, but i'm not so sure. the RAID controller may be slower, but is the bottleneck the controller or the disk drive I/O? if the latter is the bottleneck, then the former is irrelevant.

@jcarle??? watchya think?

[jcarle]

If you look at various motherboard tests, you'll often see that the same hard drive will transfer at higher bandwidth on integrated controllers then on 3rd party secondary controllers. Probably due to the lower latencies in data communication with the CPU and the like.