Best place to connect second SATA drive
 

Hey folks, I have a couple of a newb questions.


I'm upgrading from a dino system that uses IDE drives and will be building a new computer with a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard and 2 hard drives (not doing RAID).

This particular board has 2 SATA bays - one being controlled by ICH10R (6 orange connectors) and another by a Gigabyte SATA2 chip (2 purple connectors). Both support 3Gb/s connectors.


Questions

1 - Does it matter which of the 2 bays I connect the first drive to? (the one that the OS is going on) If both work, would one perform better?

2 - From a performance standpoint (transferring data from 1 drive to another), is it better to put the second drive on a connector in the same bay that the first drive is connected to (2 in the orange bay or 2 in the purple), or put it on the other? (1 to the orange and 1 to purple)

Wondering if transfer rates would be faster if different chips handled different drives (less for each to "think" about), or maybe it would be slower to have the 2 chips communicating to transfer data.

Or is all of this a non-issue and it makes no difference how any are connected?

I always put my OS drive on SATA 0/1 and optical drive on 1/2 .. i'm just picky that way

No..it's a non-issue. SATA is a serial interconnect(data can travel both ways at once), whereas IDE/PATA is a parallel interconnect(data can only travel one way at a time). That's why when using IDE, it's best to put your O/S HDD one channel 1, and your ODD/slave-drive on channel 2.