Table of Contents
Advertisement
3.3.2 PCI IDE Support
If you select Auto in the BIOS Setup program, the BIOS automatically sets up the two
PCI IDE connectors with independent I/O channel support. The IDE interface supports hard drives
up to ATA-66/100 and recognizes any ATAPI compliant devices, including CD-ROM drives, tape
drives, and Ultra DMA drives (see Section 1.5 for the supported version of ATAPI). The BIOS
determines the capabilities of each drive and configures them to optimize capacity and
performance. To take advantage of the high capacities typically available today, hard drives are
automatically configured for Logical Block Addressing (LBA) and to PIO Mode 3 or 4, depending
on the capability of the drive. You can override the auto-configuration options by specifying
manual configuration in the BIOS Setup program.
To use ATA-66/100 features the following items are required:
•
An ATA-66/100 peripheral device
•
An ATA-66/100 compatible cable
•
ATA-66/100 operating system device drivers
NOTE
ATA-66/100 compatible cables are backward compatible with drives using slower IDE transfer
protocols. If an ATA-66/100 disk drive and a disk drive using any other IDE transfer protocol are
attached to the same cable, the maximum transfer rate between the drives is reduced to that of the
slowest device.
NOTE
Do not connect an ATA device as a slave on the same IDE cable as an ATAPI master device. For
example, do not connect an ATA hard drive as a slave to an ATAPI CD-ROM drive.
3.4 System Management BIOS (SMBIOS)
SMBIOS is a Desktop Management Interface (DMI) compliant method for managing computers in
a managed network.
The main component of SMBIOS is the Management Information Format (MIF) database, which
contains information about the computing system and its components. Using SMBIOS, a system
administrator can obtain the system types, capabilities, operational status, and installation dates for
system components. The MIF database defines the data and provides the method for accessing this
information. The BIOS enables applications such as third-party management software to use
SMBIOS. The BIOS stores and reports the following SMBIOS information:
•
BIOS data, such as the BIOS revision level
•
Fixed-system data, such as peripherals, serial numbers, and asset tags
•
Resource data, such as memory size, cache size, and processor speed
•
Dynamic data, such as event detection and error logging
Overview of BIOS Features
69
Advertisement
Table of Contents
