# Alpe and Asp SATA setting on P5AD2



## Fridoso (Mar 23, 2005)

What does mean the setting:
- ALPE and ASP (enabled or disabled)
for ALPE and ASP enabled:
- Stagger Spinup Support (enabled or disabled)
- AHCI Port 3 Interlock Switch (enabled or disabled)
I have a Diamondmax 10 250Gb Sata disk on mainboard Asus P5AD2 Deluxe

Another question, in the Third IDE Master menu (that is the first SATA connector) there is a menu called "32bit data transfer" (normally disabled), have I to enable it? What mean it?

Thank you wery much.


----------



## clintfan (Sep 4, 2003)

ALPE and ASP:
According to Intel SATA documents, ALPE means "Aggressive Link Power Management Enable", and ASP means "Aggressive Slumber/Partial". The two bits work together. ALPE is like an enable; when ALPE is off, ASP is ignored. When ALPE is on, ASP is also enabled, and allows controlling certain power-related aspects of the SATA ports: basically it allows your ICH6R Southbridge chip to power some stuff down if something figures out it's not needed. 

Asus doesn't let you control ALPE and ASP separately, and it's probably unnecessary anyway. Instead they give you the one BIOS field that turns on some [fixed] combination of these two bits.


Staggered Spinup Support:
This is one of the features available when ASP is on. According to Maxtor documents, this is a feature that lets hard disks that have gone to sleep ("slumber") or are otherwise starting from a stopped condition, to power up sequentially instead of all at once. Because a drive draws most of its power during spinup, systems with many drives in them can strain the power supply. With staggered spinup active, the idea is that you can have more drives in the system on a smaller power supply. Your DiamondMax 10 is one of the newer drives that supports this feature, although it may be dependent on your supply's wiring harness... I can't quite tell, this being the first time I've seen this new feature. If your drives and cabling support this feature, I think it would be safe to set it to Enabled.


AHCI Port 3 Interlock Switch:
This is another new feature available when ASP is on. I think that this has something to do with hot-swapping disk drives; Intel documents refer to this as "Hot Plug Support". It has something to do with being able to detect if a disk drive has been removed from the system. The ICH6R Port Control Register has bits for four ports, numbered 0 to 3. Because Asus' BIOS only refers to Port 3, I suspect they may only be attempting to provide Hot Plug Support on Port 3 (probably the "SATA4" port on most mobo models, _unless they numbered it backwards in which case it's "SATA1", or unless if by "Port 3" they really mean "SATA3"_... I can't tell for sure). 

This would be considered a fairly Advanced usage of this motherboard. Unless you plan to hot-swap one (and only one) Intel SATA drive, you can probably leave this feature Disabled.


Regarding 32-bit data transfer,
this is a standard field in all the AMIBIOS' IDE configuration, not just SATA ports, and not just your mobo model. If I recall, it is here because a lot of legacy O/S's, drivers, and disk controllers weren't fully 32-bit compliant. Particularly if you are attaching, say, an older CDROM device or something like that. Also if you usually transfer small random chunks of data, being forced to transfer 32 bits all the time could hurt performance instead of helping it... though I think this unlikely. 

I think Disabled is the usual setting, and I think this means to use the lowest common denominator, which is 16-bit transfers. This makes sense, because mobo manufacturers don't want you to have a DOA experience just because you happened to hook up a very old piece of hardware. I have never found a need to enable it, and my systems all run fine. But since all peripherals are newer now, maybe I should try the 32 bits sometime.


Hope this helps,
though some of it is educated guesswork...

-clintfan


----------



## Fridoso (Mar 23, 2005)

Hope this helps,
though some of it is educated guesswork...

Of course this help, this reply satisfy all my dubt, many thanks.


----------

