Adding An Ide Peripheral; Ide Transfer Modes - ECS P5TX-Apro User Manual

P5TX–Apro User's Manual
3: Reconfiguring Your Mainboard – 3.16

Adding An IDE Peripheral

This section covers some aspects of installing internal IDE pe-
ripheral devices as they relate to the mainboard. The onboard
Enhanced IDE controller supports up to four devices, two per
IDE channel. The primary hard disk drive in most systems is an
IDE device. You may want to install more hard disks, a CD-ROM
drive or combination of these and other devices. This mainboard
supports both PIO and UltraDMA modes, which it can detect
automatically. You can install a mix of devices. With the Setup
Defaults loaded in the CMOS Setup utility, the system will auto-
matically detect and configure multiple devices of whatever mode.

IDE Transfer Modes

Hard disk read and write operations are executed via the main-
board chipset. The transfer of data between the hard disk and the
system takes place using one of a number of transfer modes –
either one of several PIO modes or UltaDMA mode.
Although there are several PIO Modes (0 through 4), and this
mainboard supports all of them, most current hard disk and CD-
ROM drives use either Mode 3 or 4. The greater the mode num-
ber, the faster the transfer rate, so you should use the fastest mode
the device can operate at. With Setup Defaults loaded in the
CMOS Setup Utility, the system will automatically detect the
fastest mode a device can use and set it for that mode.
UltraDMA is another transfer method that provides even faster
data transfer than PIO modes. To use it you must install a drive
that uses this transfer method. Drives that use PIO Mode transfer
can not use the UltraDMA setting.
The settings for drive modes are in the Integrated Peripherals
section of the CMOS Setup utility. The screen illustration at right
shows the Setup Defaults settings.