Motherboard Description | SY-7ISA+ |
1-6.8 IDE Support
The motherboard has two independent bus-mastering PCI IDE interfaces. These interfaces support PIO Mode3, PIO Mode 4, PIO Mode 5 ATAPI devices (e.g., CD-ROM), and Ultra DMA 33/66/100 synchronous-DMA mode transfers. The BIOS supports logical block addressing (LBA) and extended cylinder head sector (ECHS) translation modes. The BIOS automatically detects the IDE device transfer rate and translation mode. Programmed I/O operations usually require a substantial amount of processor bandwidth. However, in multitasking operating systems, the bandwidth freed by bus mastering IDE can be devoted to other tasks while disk transfers are occurring.
The motherboard also supports laser servo (LS-120) drives. LS-120 technology allows the user to perform read/write operations to LS-120 (120MB) and conventional 1.44MB and 720KB diskettes. An optical servo system is used to precisely position a dual-gap head to access the diskett’s 2,490 tracks per inch (tpi) containing up to 120 MB of data storage. A conventional diskette uses 135 tpi for 1.44 MB of data storage.
LS-120 drivers are ATAPI-compatible and connect to the motherboard’s IDE interface. (LS-120 drives are also available with SCSI and parallel port interfaces.) Some versions of Windows 95 and Windows NT operating systems recognize the LS-120 drive as a bootable device in both 120 MB and 1.44 MB mode.
Connection of an LS-120 drive and a standard 3.5-inch diskette drive is allowed. The LS-120 drive can be configured as a boot device if selected as Drive A in the BIOS setup program.
¡Note
If you connect a LS-120 drive to an IDE connector and configure it as the :boot: drive and configure a standard 3.5-inch diskette drive as a “B” drive, the standard diskette drive is not seen by the operating system. When the LS-120 drive is configured as the “boot: device, the system will recognize it as both the A and B drive
