SATA/IDE issue in an old Motherboard

Hardware Motherboards
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1

I ran into a weird issue while recycling a really old PC. I was planning to repurpose this old PC as some sort of home media server or NAS. The problem I’m running into is that anytime I add a third sata hdd to the system, only one drive shows up in the BIOS. This board has 4 sata ports and some sort of sata+ide channel system that I’m unable to understand. I’m attaching some screenshots of the BIOS to better explain the situation.

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System Specs:
Core 2 Duo E8400
Gigabyte G31m-s2l
4GB DDR2
Radeon HD6770/RX 480
Transcend 120GB SSD
3x WD Green 2TB

Is it possible to connect 4 sata drives to this motherboard so I have an SSD boot drive and 3 drives for a zfs1 pool?

If not should I sacrifice USB 3.0 to install a PCIe 2.0 SATA 4 port card to have a total of 6 drives (2 connected to the motherboard and 4 to the card) with 5 drives in a zfs1 pool?

2

Doesn’t the Primary IDE have to be enabled too even though you are not connecting any IDE device onto this port ?

If this doesn’t work then you may need to go with an expansion card for supporting more SATA based HDD’s

If you are looking to do a zfs pool then you should go with a 4-port SATA interface card for this.

3

Update bios to latest and check back with us

4

I’m on BIOS version f8b. Should I get the beta bios f10 or just F9?

5

That worked. Thanks a lot mate. Any idea what IDE has to do with SATA drives? Will drive performance be affected?

Also I’m planning to get a 4 port PCI to SATA card and have 7 2TB drives in a zfs2 pool spread over the motherboard and card ports. Hope that’s not insane.

PS: How do I check if this board supports TRIM for my boot SSD?

6

I see masters and slaves in the disk. There is supposed to be shorting pins in the HDDs itself for the older IDE drives.

Since moving to SATAs, there werent any need to set the correct pins on them. IIRC 2 of your 4 disks should be set to master and the 2 remaining should be set to slave. For older drives I think you should check if those are set?

7

The drives I’m using are all SATA.

8

Older boards often had combo controllers that did both S-ATA and P-ATA(EIDE(IDE)) so if you disable the “IDE” controller it will also disable the S-ATA parts of it.

9

Pretty sure this is related to the storage controller being a combo IDE/PATA/SATA interface, you have to leave the IDE enabled/active to have all the ports enabled, be it IDE or SATA.

As for the speed, this is also related to that storage controller, what speed is the SATA ports rated for ?

SATA 1 or 2 or 3 speed ?

This is the maximum speed it can transfer data at, AFAIK having the IDE enabled is not going to affect the SATA speed.

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