Hi guys,

 

  I recently bought a Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 2TB HDD to connect to my unRAID array. I already have 2 other 2TB Seagate HDDs attached and are working great. I also switched out the motherboard for an ASROCK 880G LE FX which has 6 x SATA 3 GB/s connectors. Now when I setup all my older HDDs unRAID recognized them as SCSI devices (assigning /dev/sdX), but the new drive was recognized as IDE, assigning dev/hda --- I'm confused. I looked in the BIOS. Initially it was set so that the SATA controller emulated IDE, but I changed it to AHCI (and when I did so, the BIOS no longer appeared to detect all of the hard drives in the system) but unRAID was picking all of them properly, but the new drive kept getting assigned as an IDE device. So much so that when I am trying to preclear this drive it was preclearing at a wimpy 15-20 MB/s. Can someone help me? What am I doing wrong?

 

RW

OK, so unfortunately, I got no love from this forum, but folks in the general support section were very helpful with suggestions.

 

But as a courtesy to others who may encounter this problem again, I'm going to leave the solution.

 

I found out that my motherboard (ASRock 880GM LE FX) along with a bunch of other boards that use AMI BIOS, by default disable the last two of SATA ports so that these two SATA ports are under forced IDE emulation. In AMI BIOS, there is an option under STORAGE CONFIGURATION, which reads as "Combined SATA IDE mode" which is set to [ENABLE], and this option needs to be DISABLED. Then obviously need to keep the SATA configuration to [AHCI] (instead of Native IDE, which is the default).  As soon as this is done, the motherboard recognized all of my SATA drives in AHCI mode.

 

Hope this helps someone else out in the future.

This helped me today. Thank you.

 

(Same motherboard. No idea why the last two SATA ports are arbitrarily downgraded to IDE speed.)

It is typically used for connecting SATA DVD drives.

This helped me today. Thank you.

 

(Same motherboard. No idea why the last two SATA ports are arbitrarily downgraded to IDE speed.)

Because Windows XP and prior have no SATA drivers and could not boot otherwise.  The IDE emulation allows them to boot from a hard disk connected to those ports emulating the "legacy IDE disk controller"