My motherboard has 6 SATA ports.  I plugged in 5 SATA drives.  Unraid sees 3 of them as SATA (sda-sdc) and 2 of them as IDE (hdc-hdd).  I haven't tested the 6th port yet.  During the preclear, the SATA ports were nearly 50-70% faster. 

 

Have I done something incorrectly?  Is this a limitation of Linux?  Is this a limitation of my motherboard (ASUS M4A785T-M)?  Will my performance suffer if I use the IDE ports?

See the manual, page 50:

 

On the Main menu of BIOS, select "SATA Configuration", then, under "OnChip SATA Channel [Enable]", set both "SATA Port1-Port4" and "SATA Port5-Port6" to AHCI.

My motherboard has 6 SATA ports.  I plugged in 5 SATA drives.  Unraid sees 3 of them as SATA (sda-sdc) and 2 of them as IDE (hdc-hdd).  I haven't tested the 6th port yet.  During the preclear, the SATA ports were nearly 50-70% faster. 

 

Have I done something incorrectly?  Is this a limitation of Linux?  Is this a limitation of my motherboard (ASUS M4A785T-M)?  Will my performance suffer if I use the IDE ports?

Older windows operating systems do not include any SATA drivers, this includes Win-XP.    If the only disks present were SATA, no installations of Win-XP would be possible on a motherboard.

 

To prevent tons of returns, many motherboard manufacturers will present 4 of the SATA ports as 4 IDE ports, with basic IDE functionality.  As often as not, they have it set up this was as default in the BIOS.  In some motherboards, this legacy mode actually disables all but those first 4 IDE emulated ports, leaving any remaining SATA ports non-functional.

 

You'll probably see that the native SATA configuration will be faster than the emulated IDE.      You can fix this by configuring your BIOS.

I noticed the same thing last night running my BioStar 760g. I have 5 ports filled with Sata drives and it just happens that my 5th Sata which I belive to be one of the first generation Sata because of the Molex power connector is showing up as hda opposed to sde

 

I'm glad somebody asked this question because honestly I thought it was because of the older style Sata, but it still a Sata. 

I'm glad somebody asked this question because honestly I thought it was because of the older style Sata, but it still a Sata. 

No, it is your BIOS settings asking that it emulate an IDE drive.  Set your BIOS to disable the IDE emulation, and it will show up as sdX.

 

Note:  from what I've read, in some future linux kernels, ALL drives, regardless of IDE or SATA will show up as /dev/sdX as they've merged the IDE code into the same logic as the SATA code.

That's actually possible in the version of the Kernel unRAID currently uses. Simply what needs to be done is to no longer use the deprecated "ATA/ATAI/MFM/RLL support" and instead use the current "Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers".

Thanks guys. As soon as my preclear_disk is done I'll check out the Bios. Brand new board and setup so I'm bound to find things out of wack until I get it all setup right.

On the Main menu of BIOS, select "SATA Configuration", then, under "OnChip SATA Channel [Enable]", set both "SATA Port1-Port4" and "SATA Port5-Port6" to AHCI.

 

Thanks.  I did this, and my computer wouldn't boot into Unraid.  I had configured my Flash as the first bootable IDE.  The changes wiped out the IDE boot options.  Reconfiguring the Flash to FDD and setting the boot option resolved this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the Main menu of BIOS, select "SATA Configuration", then, under "OnChip SATA Channel [Enable]", set both "SATA Port1-Port4" and "SATA Port5-Port6" to AHCI.

 

Thanks.  I did this, and my computer wouldn't boot into Unraid.  I had configured my Flash as the first bootable IDE.  The changes wiped out the IDE boot options.  Reconfiguring the Flash to FDD and setting the boot option resolved this.

Makes sense.

 

Now all your disks should show as SATA devices.