AHCI or IDE - which is better? Description of the mode, characteristics. Hard drive connection interfaces - IDE, SATA and others

Useful tips

Maximum performance achieved using the AHCI mechanism. Therefore, in all new PCs that run operating system Windows 7 or older versions of Microsoft OS, this option is used. If we are talking about older systems, then you still need to think about whether to use AHCI or IDE. What's better? The answer to this question depends on many factors.

AHCI or IDE - which is better? How to choose the desired mode?

Despite the popularity of the Windows 7, 8, 10 operating systems, many owners personal computers and laptops continue to use Win XP. The OS is stable. People feel comfortable working with her. However, Windows XP also has a number of significant disadvantages:

official support Microsoft given The OS has been completely discontinued;
technologically outdated operating system;
does not support new versions of DirectX (versions 10-12);
safety problems;
there is no support for the most current technologies;
It is impossible to install many modern programs on XP;
There are no drivers for new equipment.

The list could go on for a long time. If we consider the question of what better mode work - AHCI or IDE - then it is worth taking into account the fact that Windows XP simply does not support the first option. This, of course, also applies to older versions of the Microsoft OS. Therefore, the choice here is obvious - only IDE. But if a person belongs to the category of advanced users, he can load special drivers into the system that allow the use of the AHCI mechanism. By default, this mode is not supported.

How IDE mode works

Components that require an ATA interface for connection use the IDE mechanism to operate. This technology is outdated, but it was widely used in the nineties of the last century and at the beginning of the 2000s. The standard was introduced in the IBM PC - the first mass popular computers.

The IDE (parallel drive interface) mechanism provided data transfer at a speed of 150 Mbit/s. It did not allow the use of some technological solutions that were relevant at that time. Thus, it was impossible to hot remove a hard drive or CD drive from the system without shutting down or rebooting the system. Similar features were added by engineers some time later, but only a portion of computers received their support. Knowing the background of the development of interfaces, you can easily answer a number of questions: AHCI or IDE - which is better for a specific operating system, which scheme provides faster operation?

Active use of Parallel ATA interfaces ended around 2006, when the main role began to play new standard SATA. However, even after 10 years, the IDE is still in use, although it is used much less frequently. The mechanism is used in almost all old computers and laptops, and is active even in systems that support AHCI.

Features of AHCI mode

The emergence of a new SATA interface, which had more powerful features in comparison with the previous PATA technology, created the need for a new mechanism for working with the system. This is how AHCI mode appeared. It allowed the resources of the newly appeared interface to be used to their full potential. Today, this mechanism is supported by all modern motherboards.

Usage AHCI mode allows you to ensure the transfer of information at the highest possible speed and use any current technological solutions. All current operating systems have device drivers that operate this protocol. So what should you choose now, IDE or AHCI? What's best for modern computer? In most cases, the choice should be made in favor of the second option.

Advantages of the AHCI mechanism

Modern drives with SATA interface are fully compatible with the new mode. What advantages does this mechanism have? Still, choose IDE or AHCI - which is better? Windows 7 and newer versions of Microsoft OS are capable of working with the two above protocols. But the second one is better used for new systems.

Benefits that the user receives when using AHCI:

high data transfer speed;
excellent performance;
full compatibility with modern operating systems;
the ability to hot-swap hard drives;
support for NCQ technology (improves HDD performance).

Knowing about all the pros and cons of the solution, it’s easy to make a choice between installing AHCI or IDE in the settings. What would be better for a modern computer? If it is not equipped with PATA drives, it is better to install a new mode.

Which mode to set in BIOS settings

Although IDE mode has long been obsolete, it is still supported by motherboard manufacturers. Even the newest models have the ability to use this interface. In the BIOS settings in the corresponding section, you can change one mode to another. By default, the AHCI engine is usually installed. You can run into an exception, but this happens extremely rarely.

If you take typical situation, when a user tries to install the Windows 7 operating system on a computer, he does not even have to make any changes to the BIOS in order to use new scheme. Perhaps some will find it familiar to work with the old interface. So, IDE or AHCI - which is better? Windows 7 allows you to use both modes.

If a hard drive or other storage device is connected to motherboard via the SATA interface, you should leave the default AHCI mode. Full support for this mechanism is provided in the operating systems Windows 7, 8, 10, Ubuntu 16.04 and others. Only possible with the new mode stable work OS data.

What to do if, after enabling AHCI mode, the system stops booting

This situation may occur if the user has Windows XP or old version Linux. There is no question here whether to prefer AHCI or IDE. What will be better for the old OS? Perhaps it is preferable to set the mode to IDE. You can try to install additional drivers on the system that provide support for the new standard. However, there is no guarantee that after this procedure the OS will work correctly.

In some cases, a computer that has successfully worked for a long time running Windows XP one day stops booting. In this case, the user did not change the BIOS mode drive operation. This situation may arise due to operational errors basic system I/O In this case, the settings are reset and the AHCI mode is activated. The user must independently install support for the IDE mechanism in the BIOS settings.

And with its appearance it received the name PATA(Parallel ATA).

Story

ATA (IDE) cables: 40-wire on top, 80-wire with cable exit on bottom

The preliminary name of the interface was PC/AT Attachment(“PC/AT Connection”), since it was intended to connect to the 16-bit ISA bus, then known as AT bus. In the final version the title was changed to AT Attachment to avoid problems with trademarks.

The original version of the standard was developed in 1986 by Western Digital and, for marketing reasons, was called IDE(English: Integrated Drive Electronics - “electronics built into the drive”). It emphasized an important innovation: the drive controller is located in the drive itself, and not in the form of a separate expansion card, as in the previous ST-506 standard and the then existing SCSI and ST-412 interfaces. This made it possible to improve the characteristics of drives (due to the shorter distance to the controller), simplify their management (since the IDE channel controller was abstracted from the details of the drive operation) and reduce the cost of production (the drive controller could be designed only for “its” drive, and not for all possible drives). ; the channel controller generally became standard). It should be noted that the IDE channel controller is more correctly called host adapter, since it moved from directly controlling the drive to exchanging data with it via a protocol.

The ATA standard defines the interface between the controller and the drive, as well as the commands transmitted over it.

The interface has 8 registers occupying 8 addresses in the I/O space. The data bus width is 16 bits. The number of channels present in the system can be more than 2. The main thing is that the addresses of the channels do not overlap with the addresses of other I/O devices. Each channel can connect 2 devices (master and slave), but only one device can operate at a time.

The CHS addressing principle is in its name. First, the head block is installed by the positioner on the required track (Cylinder), after which the required head (Head) is selected, and then information is read from the required sector (Sector).

Standard EIDE(English Enhanced IDE - “extended IDE”), which appeared after IDE, allowed the use of drives with a capacity exceeding 528 MB (504 MiB), up to 8.4 GB. Although these abbreviations originated as trade names rather than official names for the standard, the terms IDE And EIDE often used instead of the term ATA. Since the introduction of the standard in 2003 Serial ATA(“serial ATA”) traditional ATA began to be called Parallel ATA, referring to the method of transmitting data over a parallel 40- or 80-core cable.

This interface was initially used with hard drives, but then the standard was expanded to work with other devices, mainly using removable media. Such devices include CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives, tape drives, as well as high-capacity floppy disks such as ZIP and floptic (use laser-guided magnetic heads) disks (LS-120/240). In addition, from the FreeBSD kernel configuration file we can conclude that even floppy disk drives (floppy disks) were connected to the ATAPI bus. This extended standard is called Advanced Technology Attachment Packet Interface(ATAPI), and therefore the full name of the standard looks like ATA/ATAPI. ATAPI is almost completely identical to SCSI at the command level and, in fact, is “SCSI over ATA cable.”

Initially, interfaces for connecting CD-ROM drives were not standardized and were proprietary developments of drive manufacturers. As a result, to connect a CD-ROM it was necessary to install a separate expansion card specific to specific manufacturer, for example, for Panasonic (there were at least 5 specific interface options designed for connecting CD-ROM). Some options sound cards, for example, Sound Blaster, were equipped with just such ports (often CD-ROM drive And sound card supplied as a multimedia kit). The advent of ATAPI made it possible to standardize all this peripherals and make it possible to connect them to any controller to which a hard drive can be connected.

To others important stage in the development of ATA there was a transition from PIO (English Programmed input/output) to DMA (English Direct memory access - direct memory access). When using PIO, reading data from the disk was controlled by CPU computer, which led to increased load on the processor and slower operation in general. Because of this, computers that used the ATA interface typically performed disk-related operations more slowly than computers that used SCSI and other interfaces. The introduction of DMA significantly reduced the CPU time spent on disk operations.

In this technology, the drive itself controls the data flow, reading data into or from memory with almost no participation of the processor, which only issues commands to perform one or another action. In this case, the hard drive issues a DMARQ request signal for a DMA operation to the controller. If the DMA operation is possible, the controller issues a DMACK signal, and the hard drive begins to output data to the 1st register (DATA), from which the controller reads data into memory without the participation of the processor.

DMA operation is possible if the mode is supported simultaneously by the BIOS, controller and operating system, otherwise only PIO mode is possible.

IN further development standard (ATA-3) was introduced additional mode UltraDMA 2 (UDMA 33).

This mode has the timing characteristics of DMA Mode 2, but data is transmitted on both the rising and falling edges of the DIOR/DIOW signal. This doubles the data transfer speed over the interface. A CRC parity check has also been introduced, which increases the reliability of information transfer.

In the history of ATA development, there were a number of barriers associated with organizing access to data. Most of these barriers are due to modern systems addressing and programming techniques have been overcome. These include maximum disk size restrictions of 504 MiB, about 8 GiB, about 32 GiB, and 128 GiB. There were other barriers, mainly related to device drivers and the organization of I/O in operating systems that did not comply with ATA standards.

The original ATA specification provided for a 28-bit addressing mode. This allowed 228 (268,435,456) sectors of 512 bytes each to be addressed, giving a maximum capacity of 137 GB (128 GiB). On standard PCs, the BIOS supported up to 7.88 GiB (8.46 GB), allowing a maximum of 1024 cylinders, 256 heads, and 63 sectors. This limitation on the number of CHS (Cylinder-Head-Sector) cylinders/heads/sectors, combined with the IDE standard, resulted in an addressable space limitation of 504 MiB (528 MB). To overcome this limitation, the LBA (Logical Block Address) addressing scheme was introduced, allowing up to 7.88 GiB to be addressed. Over time, this limitation was lifted, which made it possible to address first 32 GiB, and then all 128 GiB, using all 28 bits (in ATA-4) to address the sector. Writing a 28-bit number is organized by writing its parts into the corresponding registers of the drive (from 1 to 8 bits in the 4th register, 9-16 in the 5th, 17-24 in the 6th and 25-28 in the 7th) .

Addressing of registers is organized when the help of three address lines DA0-DA2. The first register, address 0, is 16-bit and is used to transfer data between the disk and the controller. The remaining registers are 8-bit and are used for control.

The latest ATA specifications call for 48-bit addressing, thus expanding the possible limit to 128 PiB (144 petabytes).

These size restrictions can manifest themselves in the fact that the system thinks that the disk capacity is less than its real value, or even refuses to boot and hangs at the stage of initializing hard drives. In some cases, the problem can be solved by updating the BIOS. Another possible solution is to use special programs, such as Ontrack DiskManager, which load their driver into memory before loading the operating system. The disadvantage of such solutions is that a non-standard disk partition is used, in which disk partitions are inaccessible if booted, for example, from a regular DOS boot floppy disk. However, many modern operating systems (starting from Windows NT4 SP3) can work with larger disks, even if the computer BIOS does not correctly determine this size.

ATA interface

To connect hard drives with a PATA interface, a 40-wire cable (also called a cable) is usually used. Each cable usually has two or three connectors, one of which connects to the controller connector on the motherboard (in older computers, this controller was located on a separate expansion card), and one or two others connect to the drives. At one point in time, the P-ATA cable transmits 16 bits of data. Sometimes there are IDE cables that allow connecting three disks to one IDE channel, but in this case one of the disks operates in read-only mode.

Parallel ATA pinout

Contact	Purpose	Contact	Purpose
1	Reset	2	Ground
3	Data 7	4	Data 8
5	Data 6	6	Data 9
7	Data 5	8	Data 10
9	Data 4	10	Data 11
11	Data 3	12	Data 12
13	Data 2	14	Data 13
15	Data 1	16	Data 14
17	Data 0	18	Data 15
19	Ground	20	Key
21	DDRQ	22	Ground
23	I/O Write	24	Ground
25	I/O Read	26	Ground
27	IOC HRDY	28	Cable Select
29	DDACK	30	Ground
31	IRQ	32	No Connect
33	Addr 1	34	GPIO_DMA66_Detect
35	Addr 0	36	Addr 2
37	Chip Select 1P	38	Chip Select 3P
39	Activity	40	Ground

For a long time, the ATA cable contained 40 conductors, but with the introduction of the Ultra DMA/66 (UDMA4) its 80-wire version appeared. All additional conductors are grounding conductors alternating with information conductors. Thus, instead of seven grounding conductors, there are 47 of them. This alternation of conductors reduces the capacitive coupling between them, thereby reducing mutual interference. Capacitive coupling is a problem at high transmission speeds, so this innovation was necessary to ensure proper operation of the specified specification UDMA4 transfer speed of 66 MB/s (megabytes per second). More fast modes UDMA5 And UDMA6 also require 80-wire cable.

Although the number of conductors has doubled, the number of contacts remains the same, as well as appearance connectors. The internal wiring is, of course, different. Connectors for an 80-wire cable must connect a large number of ground conductors to a small number of ground pins, whereas a 40-wire cable connects the conductors to each of their own pins. 80-wire cables usually have connectors of different colors (blue, gray and black), unlike 40-wire cables, where usually all connectors are the same color (usually black).

The ATA standard has always been established maximum length cable equal to 45.7 cm (18 inches). This limitation makes it difficult to attach devices in large cases, or connect multiple drives to a single computer, and almost completely eliminates the possibility of using PATA drives as external drives. Although longer cable lengths are widely available, keep in mind that they are not standard. The same can be said about “round” cables, which are also widely used. The ATA standard only describes flat cables with specific impedance and capacitance characteristics. This, of course, does not mean that other cables will not work, but in any case, the use of non-standard cables should be treated with caution.

If two devices are connected to the same loop, one of them is usually called leading(English master), and the other - slave(English slave). Typically, the master device comes before the slave device in the list of drives listed by the computer's BIOS or operating system. In older BIOSes (486 and earlier), drives were often incorrectly designated by letters: "C" for master and "D" for slave.

If there is only one drive on a loop, it should in most cases be configured as a master. Some drives (particularly those made by Western Digital) have a special setting called single(i.e. "one drive per cable"). However, in most cases, the only drive on the cable can also work as a slave (this often occurs when connecting a CD-ROM to a separate channel).

A setting called cable select was described as optional in the ATA-1 specification and has become common since ATA-5 because it eliminates the need to reset drive jumpers for any reconnections. If the drive is set to cable select mode, it is automatically set as master or slave depending on its location on the loop. To be able to determine this location, the loop must be with cable sampling. For such a cable, pin 28 (CSEL) is not connected to one of the connectors ( gray, usually average). The controller grounds this pin. If the drive sees that the contact is grounded (that is, it is logic 0), it is set as a master, otherwise (high impedance state) it is set as a slave.

In the days of 40-wire cables, it was common practice to install cable select by simply cutting conductor 28 between the two connectors that connected to the drives. In this case, the slave drive was at the end of the cable, and the master drive was in the middle. This placement in later versions the specifications were even standardized. When only one device is placed on a cable, this placement results in an unnecessary piece of cable at the end, which is undesirable - both for reasons of convenience and for physical reasons: this piece leads to reflection of the signal, especially at high frequencies.

The 80-wire cables introduced for UDMA4 do not have these disadvantages. Now the master device is always at the end of the loop, so if only one device is connected, you don't end up with this unnecessary piece of cable. Their cable selection is “factory” - made in the connector itself simply by exclusion this contact. Since 80-wire loops required their own connectors anyway, widespread implementation this did not amount to big problems. The standard also requires the use of connectors different colors, for easier identification by both the manufacturer and the assembler. The blue connector is for connecting to the controller, the black connector is for the master device, and the gray connector is for the slave.

The terms "master" and "slave" were borrowed from industrial electronics(where this principle is widely used in the interaction of nodes and devices), but in this case they are incorrect, and therefore are not used in the current version of the ATA standard. It is more correct to call the master and slave disks respectively device 0 (device 0) And device 1 (device 1). There is a common myth that the master disk controls the disks' access to the channel. In fact, the controller (which, in turn, controls the operating system driver) controls disk access and the order of command execution. That is, in fact, both devices are slaves in relation to the controller.

Some IDEs are free, others are paid. Some of them are quite simple, while others do almost everything you can imagine. There are a lot of options, which means that you will definitely find something that suits you.

In this article, we will help you make this choice by taking a closer look at five popular IDEs for web development.

First, let's figure out what an IDE is? According to Wikipedia, IDE is and integrated development environment (English: Integrated Development Environment) - a software system used by programmers for development software.

IDE can be consideredHow Swiss knife for software development! A good IDE will give you everything you need to be productive.

Unlike most editors, IDEs usually support full-fledged projects, not just the ability to process separate files source code. Even if the editor is capable of editing multiple files, it is not capable of supporting the creation of a project that spans an entire folder. full of files, as well as specific parameters for this project. These project options may include references to external software libraries, editor customization, version control, and debugging options.

Deciding which IDE to use is very subjective as it really depends on the functionality you are looking for, it could be:

Multi-language support
Autocompletion
Refactoring
Backlight
Debugger
SVN/Git integration
Verification of compliance with standards
Compiler
Translator
Database management and editing

There are no hard and fast rules about what is an IDE and what is not. How more features from the above list, are present in the program and available as an add-on, the closer it becomes to an IDE.

You may notice that some of the IDEs we'll cover in this tutorial aren't actually IDEs, they're editors close to IDEs. So why even include them on our list? These editors have become extremely popular in the web development space and have large communities of users who develop them with many packages, extensions and add-ons that make development much easier and transform them from just editors into very useful IDEs.

Think of them as lightweight IDEs. Fast, reliable and customizable. Remember our Swiss Army knife analogy from earlier? Sublime Text 3, Coda 2 and Atom are great examples of such IDEs. They are not traditional IDEs, but correct setting they fit perfectly into the IDE concept.

The advantages of choosing a lightweight editor over a fully established traditional IDE are that they open and launch faster. You'll see what I mean if you ever open the IDE with big project, you'll need to wait a while for the app to open and index all the files before you can start editing.

Compare this to a "light" editor, only with the features you add. This leads to the creation IDEs, which doesn't contain a lot of features that you'll never be able to use. This helps you get your developments up and running quickly. However, if you're on a very fast machine, you may not notice too much of a difference in your day-to-day development between a full IDE and a heavily customized editor. However, if you don't have that luxury, IDE performance can be very important factor in your daily development.

For these reasons, we decided to mix up the list a little and include both full-fledged and “lightweight” IDEs that will be very useful to web developers.

Let's start our web development IDE tour with PhpStorm.

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a commercial IDE from JetBrains that boasts an impressive set of useful features.

However, for a new user great amount The features available in PhpStorm may seem a little overwhelming. Don't be intimidated as PhpStorm has excellent documentation and video tutorials available on the official website.

Since PhpStorm is very rich in functionality, it may take some time to load. However, once fully loaded, PhpStorm feels great and there are no noticeable lags when editing files. One of the notable features of PhpStorm is regular updates, bug fixes and new features added.

PhpStorm is not only for PHP development(by the way, it has full support for PHP 7). It also has excellent support for HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Website: https://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/
Cost: Free 30-day trial
Release: 2009
Updated regularly: yes
Supported extensions: plugins
Written in: Java

Sublime Text 3

Next on our list is Sublime Text 3, developed by John Skinner. After many years of many years, it has become a powerful and very fast user editor. It is also well known for being extremely stable and can handle very large files with ease.

Interestingly, Sublime Text 3 hasn't seen a major release in several years. Although it is updated regularly, the updates mostly contain bug fixes along with minor improvements and new features. Sublime Text 3 is still in beta, even though it was released as a beta back in 2013! And there is currently no news of a new major release.

Sublime Text 3 launches very quickly. In fact, it happens almost instantly. It runs extremely fast with no lag or glitches, making for an extremely smooth and efficient code editing experience. It's quite minimalist and has a package manager to install add-ons (written in Python) without having to restart.

As mentioned above, it handles large files very well. There are a huge number of powerful add-ons (called packages) that make Sublime Text very flexible and versatile. It's hard to deny that using Sublime Text is a pleasure.

You can also find a large number of tutorials and video tutorials on Sublime Text 3. This proves that Sublime Text 3 is still very popular and widely used by many web developers on a daily basis, which is a testament to the quality of this fantastic little editor.

While Sublime Text is still very popular, it may start to lose ground over the next few years. However, if the Sublime Text 3 library of packages continues to flourish, then the lack of a major release can be overlooked in the short term.

Website: https://www.sublimetext.com/
Cost: $70, free version available
Release: 2008
Updated regularly: no
Written in: C++, Python
Cross-platform support: yes

Atom

Built by the GitHub team, Atom is the new guy among the popular IDEs in our roundup. Released in 2014, it is one of the most popular editors at the moment and has a rapidly growing community.

This popularity may be due to at least partly by the fact that Atom is open source source code and is completely community driven.

Atom also has a huge additional library with over 6,000 packages.

Similar to Sublime Text, Atom fully supports projects as well as individual file editing. There is built-in support for Git, which is not surprising since Atom was developed by the GitHub team.

Updates are released regularly, but since the editor is relatively new, you are unlikely to wait for them.

Many users complain that when editing there is slow loading and uneven performance, especially when working with large files. This may be due to the fact that Atom is built in JavaScript, while Sublime Text is developed in C++, which is inherently faster. Only time will tell whether future versions of Atom will be able to solve these problems. However, it's worth remembering that Atom is relatively young and has plenty of time to mature.

Overall, Atom is an excellent editor that can be easily customized for web development. It's no surprise that the Atom has already gained so much traction, and it will be really interesting to see how it matures over the next few years. This is definitely something to keep an eye on!

Website: https://atom.io/
Cost: 100% free
Release: 2014
Regular updates: yes
Supported extensions: packages
Written in: JavaScript
Cross-platform support: yes

Coda 2

Coda was first released in 2007, just a year before Sublime Text. It has been a very strong player over the years, sharing most of the web development market with Sublime Text, Mac computers. This is Coda's main drawback - even ten years after its original release, there is no Windows version. This is the only non-cross-platform editor in our review.

The editor includes a built-in terminal and source control client, as well as an FTP client and a built-in MySQL editor.

Although Coda 2 is updated regularly, these are mostly bug fixes and there have been no new versions released for many years.

Make no mistake, Coda 2 is very a good choice. It may still show itself, but I still definitely recommend checking it out before making a final decision. Especially if you are a macOS user!

Web site:
Cost: $25 (7-day free trial)
Release: 2007
Updated regularly: yes
Supported extensions: plugins
Cross-platform support: no

NetBeans

NetBeans has been around for a long time (since the mid-1990s) but is still thriving and can compete with new IDEs. Like PhpStorm, it is developed in Java and is available for multiple platforms. NetBeans consists of a set of "modules" to add functionality to the IDE.

For many years, NetBeans has been a strong favorite among web developers as one of the most fully featured IDEs.

NetBeans works well with web projects. You get code hints and highlighting, full code navigation, and a powerful debugger, which is pretty impressive for a 100% free product.

When is the upgrade planned? computer system, confusion in interfaces can seriously complicate the choice of components. Thus, motherboards may not have an IDE interface, while a hard drive or optical drive is connected via it. Or new drive with a SATA interface cannot be installed on a system with IDE ports.

Definition

IDE is the marketing name for a parallel interface (PATA) used to connect internal hard drives, optical drives, and other types of storage devices to motherboards.

SATA — serial interface data transfer, used to connect both external (eSATA) and internal drives and optical drives.

Comparison

The difference between IDE and SATA is primarily temporary. The IDE interface is a rare guest on motherboards and drives today, and its use is justified mainly only for the purpose of low-cost upgrades. True, in the case of optical drives, replacing IDE with SATA will not give virtually any gain, and the read/write speed of hard drives is far from what SATA can provide. But IDE will soon disappear completely, so it’s still worth taking care of switching to SATA. Today, SATA drives are cheaper than IDE drives and have more capacity.

SATA in any version has more high speed data transfer (ide maximum in theory 133 Mb/s, minimum SATA - 150 Mb/s), and throughput PATA (IDE) bus in the latest version is about 1064 Mbit/s versus 1500 Mbit/s SATA of the first version and 6000 Mbit/s of the third.

The cable for connecting via IDE is a wide flat strip with 80 cores (previously there were 40), the IDE interface pins are always 40. The cable for connecting via SATA is narrow, and there are only 7 pins. With one IDE cable, you can connect two devices to the motherboard, one Of which there will be a master, there is only one hanging on the SATA cable. Due to their shape, IDE cables often cause improper air circulation inside the case and interfere with the installation of components.

On the left is SATA. Right - IDE

Devices connected via IDE are powered via a four-pin molex connector, SATA devices are powered either from a 15-pin connector or from the same molex. There are adapters that allow you not to worry about connecting any devices with any interface to the power supply. Also, in the latest version of SATA, it is possible to replace the device without completely de-energizing the computer, while IDE must be disabled in the correct sequence of actions.

Conclusions website

SATA is a serial interface, IDE is a parallel interface.
The data transfer speed and bandwidth of SATA is higher.
The SATA cable is more compact than the IDE cable.
You can connect two devices to an IDE cable, and only one to a SATA cable.
IDE devices are powered via molex, SATA devices are powered via 15-pin or molex.
SATA devices are cheaper than IDE devices today and are much more common.

Hello everyone, I would like to tell you which mode to choose for your hard drive so that it works as it should.

Most likely, this article is suitable for medium-sized computers that may have the wrong option selected. But just in case, check. Before that, I also somehow didn’t think about it until my director told me.

In general, closer to the point) First you need to go into the BIOS of your computer. On different BIOS versions different buttons input, usually del on computers and F2 on laptops. When the computer boots, it usually says press F2 (Del) for bios. Just in case, here's a hint:

How to enter BIOS in different versions:

On the computer:

On a laptop:

Once you have logged in, you need to look for the Sata Configuration parameter. In it you need to select AHCI mode.

At the same time, I’ll tell you what these modes are:

There are IDE and SATA connection methods:

IDE mode

The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) connector is an outdated connector (developed in the 80s), as can be seen in the picture, it was previously used to connect hard drives, floppy drives, CD-ROMs, etc. which supported such connectors. In those days, of course, this connector was incredibly popular, but now, of course, all that remains is to remember it and change it on old computers.

In addition to all this, even the cords themselves are more convenient and take up less space. The sat connectors support HotSwap and HotPlug i.e. hot replacement, which is convenient in servers. No need to reboot or shutdown.

AHCI is a mode SATA connections devices, so I came to the solution to all the articles. Thanks to this mode sata devices work properly.

In order for all your devices to work well, you need to select it (of course, if you have not already selected it).

But first you need to choose windows mode achi otherwise Windows will not start! Of course you can try, but most likely... Therefore, I will show you how to install achi mode on Windows 7.

How to enable ACHI mode?

This is done using the registry.

Press start - run (or WIN + R).

Type regedit and press enter.

The Registry Editor will appear. In it we follow the path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci