Buying a Motherboard - Peripherals

Your motherboard also has specifications for components like Hard Drives CD-ROM's and DVD Drives. By all accounts you should nowadays be able to connect any IDE CD drive to an available IDE port likewise with SCSI systems. the same does not apply to hard disks though. Varying types of hard disks will require varying type of connectors.

ATA 33/66/100/133

Hard disks now come with a speed rating. It can be referred to in one of two ways. It will either be ATA (speed) or Ultra DMA (speed). The speeds today are rated at 33Mb/s 66/Mb/s 100Mb/s or 133Mb/s. These are referred to as ATA 33/66/100/133 or UDMA 33/66/100/133. Although the speeds can reach up to 133Mb/s this is the burst speed and real life situations often do not transfer this quantity of data in a second.

Motherboards will also have the same specifications on there IDE channels. Slightly older boards will be rated at ATA-33 or ATA-66,  ATA-100 is now the most popular and ATA-133 is being introduced into most newer boards. Fortunately in most cases the controllers are interchangeable. You can have a UDMA 33 hard disk running on a motherboard with a UDMA 100 controller as long as you use the correct cable. Likewise a UDMA 66 drive for example will work on a motherboard with a UDMA 33 controller. However this drive will only run at the lower speed. This is true for both cases the overall speed will always be the lower of the two.

The terms UDMA and ATA followed by the speed in this context mean the same thing. Different manufacturers like to use different terms if your motherboard says UDMA and your drive says ATA there is no problem your drive will work.

S-ATA

S-ATA is a new drive technology of the last few years. It is Serial-ATA meaning it transfers data in a serial format or in one long data stream line. Like the original parallel version of the ATA specification, Serial ATA has come through in generations. The original S-ATA specification was S-ATA 150. The numbers as before represent the maximum data transfer speed that the drive and S-ATA bus can handle.

Soon after the release of the S-ATA standard, work was underway on the second generation of S-ATA technology. This was released as S-ATA 3Gb/s due to its signal frequency of 3Gb/s. This frequency resulted in a data transfer maximum speed of 300Mb/s, effectively doubling the speed of the previous S-ATA standard. To follow on from S-ATA/150, this second generation quickly became known as S-ATA/300 or S-ATA II.

A third generation of the S-ATA bus has been developed which can reach speeds of 600Mb/s but at time of writing the current hard drive technologies cannot reach speeds high enough to make this useful.

RAID

Raid controllers are an addition to the IDE system. The IDE system was very limited in that it only had 2 channels and could only take 2 components on each channel. Raid put an end to this situation as well as helping out with a few more features of its own. RAID can perform operations known as mirroring and stripping. In short Mirroring can store every piece of data that the hard disk gets on a second hard disk at the same time. This covers you against hard disk failure. Striping allows you to spread the data transferred by the hard disks over more than one disk. Allowing for faster data transfers. Motherboards which have the RAID facility will normally state it in the name. E.G. Abit KT7-RAID.

SCSI

SCSI - Small Computer Scientific Interface, This is a different system to IDE, the two systems are not interchangeable and so if you are using a SCSI controller you will need to make sure you buy SCSI hardware to fit it. Some motherboard do come with SCSI controllers on board but the bulk have to be bought and added on by the use of a SCSI controller card. SCSI devices are often considered to be faster and more reliable than that of their IDE counterparts. This does come at a price however because SCSI hard disks and CD-ROM's are a lot more expensive than IDE.

If you have SCSI devices a SCSI controller is yet another thing you will have to look for when purchasing a motherboard. If you have IDE then you should try to get at least the speed of your hard disk if not faster when pick the speed of your IDE controller on the motherboard.

Next - Onboard components