There is no need for a master or slave distinction with SATA drives because they each connect to the motherboard with their own SATA cable. Two IDE/PATA drives, on the other hand, could share the ...

[Jan]’s first target was some unpopulated footprints for SATA ports onboard, but after soldering on a connector, it was found that the BIOS wouldn’t recognise the extra ports anyway.

Although SATA drives can be connected to a SAS interface, SAS drives require an adapter to hook up to a SATA controller (see SATA and SATA Express). SAS is a point-to-point architecture that uses ...