Neophyte Question - Mobo Compatibility with HD

[AlexSP]

Hello,

I'm purchasing a DFI LanParty 875PRO motherboard, information on it can be found here.

My question is, the second page of actual information on it shows the details of it. I'm wondering whether or not I can use a SATA drive, and what is the differance between SATA vs. ?

Thanks alot to anyone that can help

~Alex

 

[Target]

The DFI Lanparty 875Pro is a real dandy motherboard. Very Fast and stable with enough features to satisfy most people. You wont regret your purchase.

Yes, You can use SATA drives with it. That is Serial ATA versus what are currently the most prevalent drives which are in reality Parallel ATA drives. This board has 4 standard IDE channels so you can add upto eight devices like PATA hard drives and CDROM's, DVD's, etc. You can add upto 2 SATA drives to the motherboard, making a total of 10 drives!!!

SATA drives currently have a theoretical thoroughput of 150 Mb/sec and the highest standard IDE drives only go upto 133 Mb/sec. Once either drive is installed in your system, you wont see any difference as far as accessing them.

A real nice feature is the added Intel Gigabit CSA chip that communicates directly with the MCH (memory controller hub) thus avoiding the overhead imposed by the PCI bus. On my board, the CSA chip somehow uncaps the 768M download restriction imposed by my ISP. I test out at over 3.5M at most of the popular download test sites. The funny thing is when I put an Intel Gigabit PCI card in, it is limited to the 768M/sec download that I pay for.

-Target

 

[Shrapnill]

Look above the CMOS battery then a bit to the left in this picture. Theres 2 black inputs with "SATA" written to the right of em. Those are the SATA ports.