Motherboards — Expansion ports & IDE/SATA ports
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Expansion ports allow you to add more hardware to your computer such as graphics cards, sound cards, network cards etc. Below are some of the more well known types of expansion port.
There are different types of expansion port and on an older motherboard you might find an ISA port, PCI ports, along with a AGP port:
ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) — This is an old port which made an appearance in 1981 but would not be seen on the motherboards of today.
PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) — PCI was created in 1993 and is still used in modern motherboards.
AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) — This port was created in 1996 and is found on older motherboards as it has now been superceded by PCIe x16. The AGP port is used for older type Graphic Cards.
A modern motherboard may contain several PCI ports, PCIe x1 ports, and one or two PCIe x16 ports:
PCIe (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express) — PCIe was created in 2004 and replaces PCI.
You may find various PCIe ports such as PCIe x1, PCIe x4, PCIe x8, PCIe x16 which are all different lengths. PCIe x1 is commonly used along with PCIe x16 for Graphics Cards.
PCIe x16 — The PCIe x16 is used for a Graphics Card and supecedes the AGP port.
IDE & SATA Ports
IDE (PATA), and SATA ports are used to connect storage devices such as Hard Drives, Optical Drives, and Solid State Drives.
IDE (Intergrated Drive Electronics) which is now also called PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) was designed in 1986 and is found in older motherboards. You can connect two drives to each port giving you a total of four drives.
SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) was created in 2003 and supercedes IDE. It is found in newer motherboards and each port can support one drive.
The picture above show two IDE ports — IDE1 (blue), and IDE2 (white).
You would connect your main hard drive which contains the operating system to IDE1 and set it as the primary master. More details in the Hard Drive section of this website.
The six SATA ports in the picture above have two white high-speed ports (SATA 6Gb/s), and four slower ports (SATA 3Gb/s). You would connect your main hard drive which contains the operating system to the white SATA 6G_1 port particularly if the drive supports this speed. More details in the Hard Drive section of this website.
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IDE vs SATA — Difference and Comparison
IDE and SATA are different types of interfaces to connect storage devices (like hard drives) to a computer’s system bus. SATA stands for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (or Serial ATA) and IDE is also called Parallel ATA or PATA.
SATA is the newer standard and SATA drives are faster than PATA (IDE) drives. For many years ATA provided the most common and the least expensive interface for this application. But by the beginning of 2007, SATA had largely replaced IDE in all new systems.
The ATA interface (ATA stands for AT attachment where «AT» refers to IBM’s PC/AT for which it was originally built) evolved in stages from Western Digital’s original Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. After the introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA.
Comparison chart
| IDE | SATA | |
|---|---|---|
| Advantages | Maximum compatibility | Inexpensive, large storage capacity. |
| Disadvantages | Lacks support for new technology such as native command queuing and hot-plugging hard drives | Lower MTBF than SAS (700,000 hours to 1. 2 million hours of use at 25 °C), less suited for servers. |
| Hot plugging (add/remove component while the computer is running) | IDE interface does not support hot plugging | SATA interface supports hot plugging |
| Speed | data transfers at the rate of up to 133MB/s | Data transfers at the rate of up to 6 Gb/s |
| Data cable | Ribbon-like, wide, can be up to 18 inches long | Narrow, can be up to a meter (roughly 3ft) long. Power and data split into two connections. |
| Lineage | Superseded by SATA | Supersedes Parallel ATA (PATA) aka IDE |
| Year Created | 1986 | 2003 |
| Jumpers | In a computer system, it’s possible to have more than one harddrive. To connect multiple IDE drives, you need to chain the ribbon cables from one to the next. The computer system has no idea which is the main drive, from which to load the OS. |
SATA drives don’t use jumpers. Each drive connects directly to the motherboard. To set the primary drive, you can access the settings from the computers BIOS (special software that runs when you start the computer). |
Differences in Cables and Connectors
SATA (right) and IDE (left) hard drives. The SATA hard drive has the data cable on the right and power cable on the left. The IDE data cable is ribbon-like (on the left)
Hard drives need a cable/connection for data and one for power. Parallel ATA only allows data cable lengths up to 18 in (457 mm) while SATA allows cable lengths up to 1 m (3.28 ft). eSATA cables can be 2 m in length.
IDE consists of a 40-pin connector attached to a ribbon cable.
80-pin connectors were also introduced later. The connectors are black in a 40-pin connector while in an 80-pin connector, they come in 3 colors: blue — controller, gray — slave drive, and black — master drive. Each cable has two or three connectors, one connector is attached to the interface that connects to the computer system (mother board) and the others are connected to the drives.
SATA consists of an 8 mm wide wafer connector on each end and the cable has a 7-pin connector, 3 grounds and 4 active data lines in two pairs. It has the facility to attach only one drive and so Serial ATA does away with Master/Slave configurations.
Video
This video explains how to change the hard drive on a desktop computer; it also shows the differences between SATA and IDE connector cables.
Adapters and Integrated Motherboards
You can buy integrated motherboards that allow a computer to use both SATA and IDE hard drives.
However, only one of the two may be used at any given time and both cannot be used simultaneously. Adapters are also available that allow an IDE drive to be used with a SATA motherboard and vice versa. These IDE/SATA adapters mask the underlying hard drive and simulate its functioning to match the expectations of the computer’s motherboard. They usually cost less than $15.
Variants
Two variant of SATA — eSATA and eSATAp — are available. eSATA is meant for external connectivity. eSATA cannot supply power from the motherboard to the hard drive. In order to overcome this limitation, eSATAp drives were introduced. eSATAp port combines the strength of both eSATA (high speed) and USB (compatibility) into a single port.
Speed
Data transfer speed for IDE ranges from 5MB/s up to 133MB/s (ATA100/133). The parallel wire transfer mode reached its limit with the speed of 133 MB/s.
SATA took off where ATA stopped as far as speed is concerned. The first generation of SATA was 1.
2 Gbit/s (150 MB/s; note that MB is megabytes and Gb is gigabits) similar to PATA/133. Today the third generation of SATA (3.0) (released on May 27, 2009), 6 Gbit/s (600 MB/s) hard drives and motherboards are being used.
Operation
Air flow
The wide wire in IDE cables caused airflow problems inside the case. The narrower SATA cable allows free airflow inside the case.
Hot Plugging
SATA drives have an additional feature of Hot plugging which mean that even as the computer is running drives can be removed or added.
Power Consumption
PATA (IDE) drives need 5 volts and 12 volts in desktop form factor.
SATA drives use 5 & 12 volts & ‘can’ include 3 volts as well
but nearly all current disk drives do not use the 3.3 V line.
Master/Slave Configuration
SATA has also done away with the master/slave configuration (technically, device 0 and device 1) used in IDE drives. With PATA (IDE), attaching two hard disks to the same channel required one to be set to be the master, the other the slave.
For hardware, this usually meant setting the right jumper settings.
But the SATA bus is a serial point-to-point bus, which means only one device can be connected on each channel. Many SATA drives can connect to the motherboard via multiple ports, and the drive to boot from is specified in the BIOS settings.
Where to Buy
- IDE Drives (on Amazon)
- SATA Hard Drives (on Amazon)
- IDE/SATA adapters
References
- Wikipedia: Integrated Drive Electronics
- Wikipedia: Serial ATA
- How to ‘Slave’ a SATA Drive when the ‘Master’ is Also SATA
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How to connect an IDE hard drive » Page 3
How to connect an IDE hard drive Found less and less, but these devices go out of circulation along with our youth.
Young people do not appreciate them either, give Sata to everyone, but oh well, progress is progress, we must go forward, but the question of connecting devices with an IDE (ATA) interface arises from time to time, so we decided to dedicate our article to this.
Note: Friends, if your motherboard does not have IDE connectors for connecting obsolete hard drives, then you can still connect such a drive to your computer or laptop using these adapters:
- AgeStar universal adapter
- External box for connecting hard drives IDE, SATA!
- 3-port SATA and IDE controller — VIA VT6421A SATA
- Thermaltake Muse 5G external HDD enclosure for laptop hard drive separately and tearfully asked to make it work. Maxtor disk drive — IDE connection interface (250 GB, IDE) install it in the system unit, everything is correct we connect , but hard disk IDE is not detected in the BIOS. Maybe because of the wrong position of the jumper? Either it was not included in the IDE BIOS controller, or .
.. but first things first.
I will say briefly: disk drives of the IDE connection interface must be configured with a special jumper, the contacts on which the jumper is mounted are located on the end of the drive, and the instructions for using the jumpers are on the top side of the hard drive case.
How to properly configure hard drives using jumpers, you can read here Jumpers on a hard drive.
According to the instructions, our hard drive is configured as a master with the jumper in the extreme left position, put the jumperAnd so we insert it onto the hard drive into a special basket on our system unit and fasten it with four screws, the screws for fixing the hard drives are larger than the screws for fixing CD/DVD drives.
There is one IDE connector on our motherboard, two devices can be connected to it, according to the rules, one device on the loop is configured as a master (Master), the jumper is also set as a master, connect it to the connector at the end of the loop, the second should be a slave (Slave), it is connected to the connector in the middle of the cable, but we will not connect anything to it, we have one hard disk, and the Sata interface drive is already connected.
nine0026 Another rule is not to install a hard drive and a CD/DVD drive on the same cable.
We connect the IDE hard drive to the motherboard using an 80-wire cable.
The cable for connecting the IDE hard drive has one missing pin,there is a special slot for it on the motherboard and it is almost impossible to connect it incorrectly, turn on the computer, go into BIOS
Initial BIOS-Main tab, four SATA connectors on the motherboard are marked as four channels, the Optiarc DVD RW drive is connected to the third connector, we will look for our IDE hard drive in another tab
Move with the arrows on the keyboard to the right to the Advanced item, then down to the Onboard Devices Configuration parameter, it is responsible for the operation of the controllers integrated into the motherboard and I / O ports, now you will understand everything, press Enter
Here we see that the Marvell IDE controller built into our motherboard, which is responsible for the operation of hard drives, is turned off, put it in the Enabled position
Marvell IDE controller in the Enabled position
and again we go into the BIOS to see our Maxtor hard drive, we need the Boot tab and cheers, our hard drive was found, alive and unharmed-IDE: Maxtor 4A250J0, so we connected the IDE hard drive, now we can set the boot from the drive, as to do this, read our BIOS: Boot from disk and load the operating system How to install Windows XP
Comparative analysis of Serial ATA and IDE drives
The SATA interface, providing a data exchange rate with a hard drive up to 1.
5 Gb / s, has a built-in system for checking the integrity of stored data. Thanks to the introduction of the 875P chipset with an integrated SATA controller, drives with this interface can be connected directly to a connector on the motherboard without installing an additional controller. Switching to the SATA interface provides better air circulation inside the system unit, as wide cables are being replaced by thin cables. In addition, Maxtor announced that its Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives have been tested for compatibility with the Intel 875P chipset, designed for Pentium 4 processors with a system bus running at 800 MHz. The tests were carried out in the laboratories of Intel and Maxtor. nine0072 This testing allows system integrators and OEMs to use proven combinations of SATA hard drives and the Intel 875P chipset.
Gradual reduction in the cost of drives with Serial ATA interface (the difference with similar IDE drives is less than 10% today) and an increase in the number of motherboards with an integrated Serial ATA controller will inevitably lead to the fact that sooner or later you will have to say goodbye to the UltraATA interface.
In addition, the old standard cables are too short, and modern drives will reach the maximum theoretical IDE interface bandwidth of 133 MB pretty soon. nine0099 Operating temperature 5-55°C Interface Serial ATA IDE, UDMA/133 support Test computer configuration
Test system Processor 4 2.8 GHZ / 800MHz / 512K Maternal fee Micro-Star MS-6758-030 875P Neo-LSR SOKKET478 Memory 2*512 GB Samsung PC-3200 Controller SCSI
Parallel ATA: FastTrak TX2000 ATA133, RAID 0/1/0+1Graphic card Matrox P750 64 mb External SCSI
disk array 97200rpm 8Mb.
Its retail price on November 19, 2003 is $112. TX2000 array configured with Promise FastTrak TX2000 controller in Raid level 0 of 2 Maxtor 120Gb DiamondMax Plus 9 7200rpm 8Mb IDE drives. Retail price as of November 19, 2003 is $102.
The WIN XP array was configured programmatically in the Windows XP SP1 operating system in Stripe mode also from 2 Maxtor 120Gb DiamondMax Plus 9 IDE drives7200rpm 8Mb.
The Pinnacle Systems DVExpert test utility (supplied with Pinnacle video editing boards) was used when testing Win XP and TX 2000. DVExpert does not work correctly with the SATA interface, so the SATA array was not tested by this utility.
Read and write speeds
The test data has been tabulated.
nine0072 Read and write modes
Speed, Mb/s TX2000 WIN XP Dual Read
min 1.3 4.7 Average 36.4 38.8 MAX 112 84 69 Dual Write
min 0.6 0.6 average 50 50 max 20090
76.5 Single Read
min 83. 
9 1.3 average 108.2 76.4 Max 112.5 83.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3.3IHA Single Write
nine0090
min 3.0 0.6 average 51,4 48.2 Max 83.3 SATA and TX 2000 arrays have been tested with HD Tach 2.61 .
Read and write speeds
Sata and TX 2000 test results using HD Tach 2.7
SATA, TX 2000 and Win XP test results from Storm Test (supplied with Canopus DV Storm cards)
The next two tests show the file copying time (external SCSI disk array Medea 2*240 RTR was used as source and destination).
