Buying New Comp Parts...

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Tue Dec 22, 2009 11:35 pm

Unless you are using a SSD, then you won't notice it. If you are using an SSD, then NCQ is moot anyways.

I think most of the AHCI drivers where started after XP support ended - hence the reason for the inconsistent support for it.

As for hotplgu - my sata drives are hot pluggable on my nf4 board, under XP, but not my newer AMD board.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Tue Dec 22, 2009 11:37 pm

Ah, ok thanks. Figured SSDs would require that kind of insane bandwidth. Most of the bandwidth for non-SSDs is used by the cache for burst rate IIRC.

funkyass · Post by **funkyass** » Tue Dec 22, 2009 11:42 pm

One thing about IDE emulation vs AHCI, on my board at least, is that I am limited to 4 drives using IDE emulation.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Tue Dec 22, 2009 11:46 pm

I assume you have a SATA controller with 6 ports (and a secondary controller with PATA+SATA on it)... that's probably more of an issue to your board though.

Post by **odditude** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 12:27 am

IDE emulation, by definition, would limit you to four drives: pm, ps, sm, ss. allowing more devices would require emulating multiple IDE controllers.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 6:09 am

Well, you technically need as many IDE controllers as you have pairs of disks. My BIOS lists the 5th and 6th ports as Third Master and Fourth Master... instead of Third-Primary+Slave...

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 8:33 am

Yeah. There's nothing that prevents you from having more than two IDE channels. It's just that four devices is all most consumers need, so only two channels are built into most motherboard chipsets.

Rashidi · Post by **Rashidi** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 12:00 pm

i really miss the old days when {ISA} sound card come with an extra built-in IDE controler.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 2:08 pm

Oh damn, just imagine how slow that is compared to a proper PCI controller. Most of those sound card integrated solutions only supported PIO mode, too.

It's like buying integrated video support.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Wed Dec 23, 2009 3:30 pm

Whoa Nellie!

I remember a friend buying the Creative AWE32+CDROM pack... it was nice for the most part.

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 1:32 am

Rashidi wrote:i really miss the old days when {ISA} sound card come with an extra built-in IDE controler.

Ah yeah, the CD-ROM upgrade kits.

I think most of those were only partially-functional controllers. But I never had one, so I'm not sure.

Nowadays you can grab a PCI card with two IDE channels on it for cheap, though. Heck, even a basic RAID controller's not too expensive.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 1:41 am

I don't think my friend tried to connect a HD to that IDE controller, but it was probably necessary to avoid using existing IDE controllers to prevent the CDROM from being installed... you couldn't really anticipate the massive configurations that was available out there when ISA was prominent.

Post by **odditude** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 1:59 am

i miss the old vlb everything-on-one-card cards... a single card had 2 serial, 1 parallel, 1 gameport, 2 IDE, 1 floppy, and made those awe32+ide cards look short

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 2:04 am

Those tend to occupy another bracket, which kinda annoyed me.

Post by **odditude** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 2:14 am

Deathlike2 wrote:Those tend to occupy another bracket, which kinda annoyed me.

that just means you didn't have an awesome case with punchouts for the extra ports

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 3:48 am

odditude wrote:i miss the old vlb everything-on-one-card cards... a single card had 2 serial, 1 parallel, 1 gameport, 2 IDE, 1 floppy, and made those awe32+ide cards look short

Yeah... and then they either refused to sit right and crashed the system, or they crashed it because VESA Local Bus was a terrible standard and fucked the signal timings up horrifically.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 3:57 am

The extra long clusterfuck of a video card or just any card on that bus is asking for a disaster.

Gil_Hamilton · Post by **Gil_Hamilton** » Thu Dec 24, 2009 5:17 am

Deathlike2 wrote:The extra long clusterfuck of a video card or just any card on that bus is asking for a disaster.

Just from mechanical issues!

Even ignoring the fact that VLB was just dragging 486 address lines out and that caused timing errors right off the bat if you had too many cards in.

Or that changing CPUs could change your bus clock rate, and a lot of cards couldn't handle >33MHz clocks.

God, every time I'm reminded of VLB I cringe at how kludgy it was.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Sun Oct 31, 2010 8:14 am

Small bump

I've reinstalled XP recently while using the Intel RST 10.x series drives (not officially released, but are WHQL certified) AND fortunately it isn't causing any BSODs!

I set my system up for RAID mode on the Intel ICH10R controller, and have found that the RAID drivers tend to be less BSOD sensitive (through experimentation) than the AHCI drivers on XP. I have no idea why that is the case, but I hope that's useful to someone.

Although, between that time and now, I did get a BIOS update that updated Intel's RAID/ACHI BIOS to 1.20e, which is supposed to have faster detection for quicker booting. The annoying thing is that the addition JMicron controllers suck ass (I have to use it for the IDE portion, because I still have PATA HDs) because it's AHCI/RAID mode adds like 3+ XP "revolutions" (that moving line) to my boot time. Very annoying crap.

kode54 · Post by **kode54** » Sun Oct 31, 2010 8:27 pm

Very interesting. Considering my dad and I both have desktop motherboards with ICH10R and JMicron controllers. I have no trouble with AHCI, but then, I'm also running Windows 7, while he's still running Windows XP.

For him, setting up the AHCI drivers and enabling AHCI mode will hopefully fix an annoying issue he had with his optical drive randomly deciding to disappear completely from the device manager after working perfectly for over a month at a time. It usually solved itself by powering the system down for a while and then rebooting it.

And yes, he has to use the JMicron controller for PATA because he still has an older drive installed. Also, I don't think he's ever experienced a BSOD related to the hard drive controllers. Or anything else, for that matter.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Mon Nov 01, 2010 12:49 am

kode54 wrote:Very interesting. Considering my dad and I both have desktop motherboards with ICH10R and JMicron controllers. I have no trouble with AHCI, but then, I'm also running Windows 7, while he's still running Windows XP.

For him, setting up the AHCI drivers and enabling AHCI mode will hopefully fix an annoying issue he had with his optical drive randomly deciding to disappear completely from the device manager after working perfectly for over a month at a time. It usually solved itself by powering the system down for a while and then rebooting it.

I've never had that happen, but that is strange. Sounds more like an issue with the drive... but the JMicron controller is primarily "ideal" for eSATA they are supposed to be used for... I had my optical drive originally in the JMicron port (now on the Intel port, because there's supposed to be some sort of power saving feature for optical drives in the newest drivers) and the most annoying attribute was that it was ALWAYS considered hot pluggable... even with a hard drive that was temporarily put in there. I used the drivers that is supposed to "detect" which mode it is in, but the damn drivers/hardware is clearly fail IMO. Only "plus" was that having a SATA hard drive plugged in reduced boot time, but that really seems like a bug or bad behavior to me.

And yes, he has to use the JMicron controller for PATA because he still has an older drive installed. Also, I don't think he's ever experienced a BSOD related to the hard drive controllers. Or anything else, for that matter.

I've had a BSOD, but my primary boot drive was a PATA hard drive at the time and wanted to switch from ACHI/RAID to IDE... the JMicron controller was PATA+2SATA port deal, and I thought it would be OK, but apparently not. Anyways, booting to the SATA drive on the Intel controller definately helped boot speed. Don't expect anything good with the JMicron poop.

ZSNES board

Buying New Comp Parts...

Re: Buying New Comp Parts...

Re: Buying New Comp Parts...

Re: Buying New Comp Parts...