Serillel and PC setup Question

I just received my MB today and was not aware that ABIT included the Serillel converter with their MB.

I have a WD 160GB IDE hard drive and already bought some nice round IDE cables. I will only be installing one HD in my system at the moment along with a DVD/CD combo drive.

What are your recomendations on using this thing, is there and benifit ,speed, etc. Thanks.

There is no speed benefit, the drive is still slower than the theoretical transfer rate. My HD was slower on that adapter.

If you look on ABit's web site they do report a speed increase but I guess you cant believe everthing you read. Thats why you need independent tests (small conflict of interest).

Is it possible to install a single HD drive since it is SATA / RAID. I guess if I try using the converter I will have to set it up as RAID 0. Is this correct?

It is possible, but it will just be a single drive, not RAID.

The noticeable benefit is you can lose the bulky IDE cable (even compared to a round IDE cable, SATA cables are much smaller.) Thats the only reason I use the converter on my IDE hard drive.

Also, apparently using the SATA controller doesn't use any CPU cycles, where IDE does. I don't know if it's true, but I've read that a few places.

t_biggs.

I have also concluded that the only benifit would be improved air circulation within the case by loosing the IDE cable. I did read about the CPU cycles also. Thanks.

How do you have your system setup then, 80GB WD as your boot drive on SATA and your Combo Drive on IDE Channel 1 (Set to Master)? This is my first attempt at building a system and I'm trying to figure out the best way to setup the components, since I also be using a single drive and comdo CD/DVD.

Thank for the help.

Yeah, thats how its set up. The inital post is incredibly fast, probably about 1-2 seconds. Then it goes to the SATA bios. That takes a little longer, maybe 10-15. You could probably boot up faster if you had the hard drive on IDE too, and disable SATA. But it wouldn't be noticeable really. (My system, from pushing the power button, to loading MBM5, the last startup program to finish loading, is 54 seconds. Disabling SATA and using IDE only would probably shave 10 seconds at most.)

If you use SATA, when you install Windows, be sure to read the status bar on the bottom durring initial startup of the setup. It will tell you to push F6 to install a 3rd party SCSI or RAID controller. Push it a few times quick to make sure it knows you pushed it, and wait. When it finishes loading the inital part of setup, it asks for the floppy disk for the drivers. Put it in, and pick the driver. Then install Windows like normal.

With Serielle adapter you are technically limited to ATA100. The speed benefit comes from not sharing the IDE bus with other devices. So, when doing certain tasks like ripping a audio CD, the process finishes faster with the HDD on Serielle and your CD on IDE.