Hi All,
Sorry if this has been answerd before but I did a search and did not come up with anything.
I am using the system listed in my sig but would like to know is it possible to install the SATA drivers now that I am up and running and have been for a year or so.
I see from my Bios that the HDD's are running as IDE's and not SATA? Am I lossing system performance because of this? I'm running Win XP home.
Any help on this would be appeciated.

Many thanks
Gary

Welcome to the forums Gary,

IIRC, your BIOS will say IDE because that is what the SATA disks should act like (in function), they could also probably be set to RAID (which you probably don't want) and could perhaps be disabled all together...
I'm 99% sure that you're not loosing any performance here
The only place you would be loosing performance is if your hard drive(s) are using SATA1 (1.5GB iirc)instead of SATA2 (3GB iirc), if they are fairly new, they should be SATA2.

Ben

Thanks Ben for the quick reply,

Looking at the sales ticket from Dabs the HDD are "Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160GB 7200RPM S300 8Mb cache" so I'm not sure if the S300 bit = SATA2?
According to SiSoft Sandra there is "SATA150" in brackets after each drive and the Samsung SATA DVD drive.

Hope this helps?

Gary

Your Bios, like my Asus Bios should have three options, RAID, IDE and AHCI (advanced host controller interface).

IDE will tend to work fine and is a little easier to boot from optical drives and stuff on certain makes of motherboard (anyone with an Abit will know what I mean), but to make use of all the advanced features of SATA II like Native Command Queuing, you need to enable AHCI. In normal use you are unlikely to see much benefit of AHCI.

If you install Windows as IDE mode then switch to AHCI in the Bios you will be greeted by a blue screen and possibly vice versa.

i dont IP35 BIOS rev 18, the drive is a samsung S203P. installed windows with it, and have been booting Linux live CDs off it for the past year or so, nothing has ever gone wrong.



i wasnt again, Ip35 bios rev 18, hard drive is a samsung spinpoint 501. just got bored one day an changed it, then got bored a few weeks later and installed proper intel AHCI drivers

I have an IP-35 in one machine, see it in the pics thread that someone made, and it it fussy, as was my old AB9 and AB9 Quad GT.

hmm, what BIOS version are you running? ive just had a look on Abits website, seems revision 14 had an update from the AHCI ROM. i bought mine near P35's EOL, so it came preloaded with version 18, if yours is an earlier board it could have an older BIOS, without the ROM update

i also took the liberty of checking up on the other two boards you mentioned. their newest BIOS revisions both mention similar AHCI updates. if you need DVD booting, then you might like to have a look at them too

actually come to think about it, i may have found a guide on the internet for safely switching between IDE and AHCI modes. ill have a look around and see if i can find it again