P4P800 BIOS HD settings

  • Thread starter Thread starter John Smith
  • Start date Start date
J

John Smith

Hi,

Is there any advantage in using the HD info from the HD manufacturer -
sectors, etc - in the BIOS set-up or is it no different to using just AUTO?

Thanks,


J.
 
Hi,

Is there any advantage in using the HD info from the HD manufacturer -
sectors, etc - in the BIOS set-up or is it no different to using just AUTO?
Click to expand...

Use Auto, if it doesn't work your drive is probably broken.
 
Auto works fine. I just wondered if there was any benefit in manually
configuring the drive settings?
Click to expand...

No, Auto will read the settings correctly and set them. The old days
you're talking about were before the ATA standard, when the various
combinations of controller and drive logic were a little too numerous
for an auto setting.
 
Thanks,

J.


jaeger said:
No, Auto will read the settings correctly and set them. The old days
you're talking about were before the ATA standard, when the various
combinations of controller and drive logic were a little too numerous
for an auto setting.
Click to expand...
 
John Smith said:
Auto works fine. I just wondered if there was any benefit in manually
configuring the drive settings?
Click to expand...

The only benefit would be a faster boot up time as the bios dosn't need to
detect settings.
The improvement in boot time is rather little, so i wouldn't bother with it
myself.
I do however manually set the DMA for the drives to ensure it uses Ultra
DMA.
 
As I understand it the P4P800 only uses ATA-100 on the EIDE Channels and
ATA-133 on the RAID Channel? Or do you just set it to the maximum the drive
can support no matter what channel you have it on?

J.
 
John Smith said:
As I understand it the P4P800 only uses ATA-100 on the EIDE Channels and
ATA-133 on the RAID Channel? Or do you just set it to the maximum the drive
can support no matter what channel you have it on?

J.
Click to expand...
You are correct.
The bios should tell you the max that your drive can be set at.
It says that my SATA drive can be set at UDMA-6 (ATA-133), even though the
primary, secondary, third and fourth channels can only be set at a max of
UDMA-5. (ATA-100). I don't think the bios will actually allow you to set DMA
above what your drive is detected at. Take CD-ROM's for example.
I would need to move this drive to the raid channel to use UDMA-6.
 
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