smokeyone

I have been asking a question a day on these forums trying to get everything working correctly - all seems fine now on the Ubuntu installation.
Anyway when I installed Ubuntu my Sata HDD on my laptop was set to IDE in the bios. Is there any reason to change it back to Sata or just leave well enough alone.....thanks

Scandium

Can you change between SATA and IDE? Or do you mean AHCI and IDE? Perhaps you're talking about IDE emulation mode.

As a desktop user you won't benefit from SATA/AHCI mode. With a normal hard disk you won't have any bandwith issues and features like NCQ are useless, too. An advantage of IDE is that most hard disks only provide SMART values in IDE mode.

So if you don't have any kind of special setup and your computer works properly, leave it on IDE mode. I personally have AHCI enabled, because I don't need SMART and it works just out of the box.

smokeyone

So leave well enough alone then - it's not like trying to install vista where you need the drivers installed at the same time otherwise vista will not recognise the hdd - I speak from experience here and spent hours trying to do a fresh vista install on a Sata hd.

Scandium

I know, I know. I used to switch from IDE to AHCI in Windows, too.

I think Windows 7 has improved this, but that's OT.

smokeyone

Have been looking at getting a new desktop and trying to check whether ide or sata as I could not face the vista installation again. Of course I could leaving existing desktop for vista and have ubuntu on new model............

Rubberman

Go native. If the drive is sata and you are installing a current linux distribution then change the bios to native sata instead of ide/pata emulation. I did that on all my Linux laptops. The performance is possibly better (difficult to tell) and there have been zero problems with that. If you are dual booting Linux and Windows, then you will possibly need to use the IDE/PATA mode, but you can run them in a virtual machine under linux and tell the virtual machine it has an IDE interface.

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smokeyone

Thanks for the info. I suppose even an older desktop would run better under linux than windows...