SATA questions

[jh88fan]

Just got my new build together, going through the BIOS settings, and notice a couple of SATA features I'm not familiar with. One setting is to enable/disable AHCI mode, and another is to enable/disable Native IDE mode. Right now they're both disabled (default). What do these settings do, and what would be the advantage of enabling them? Just curious.

Thanks

[Dave21]

If you install the right drivers, you can enable AHCI mode to make your sata drive run faster.

Edit: you should also read your motherboard manual about AHCI as well.

[XenaWP]

ACHI or RAID mode enables all the features of SATA drives (hot swapping, NCQ, etc.). However, you are required to do a ridiculously unfriendly floppy drive installation of the necessary drivers during Windows installation to enable one of those modes.

IDE emulation works fine, I'd say 90% of people use it simply because they have no idea that they need to install the ACHI drivers to get "full" SATA performance out of the drive.

[glc]

The floppy installation is easy. My new build on a P5K Pro has all SATA drives (both hard and optical) and SATA is set to AHCI. The motherboard DVD has a floppy maker, and it's a simple press F6 and put the floppy in at the beginning of XP setup.

[XenaWP]

GLC, it's not hard, it's just that if you don't read or research it first, there's no indication that you have to do it. The BIOS defaults to IDE emulation.

I just don't get why these drivers aren't on the Windows install CD.

[glc]

Because AHCI did not exist when XP came out. I believe Vista has native AHCI drivers.

[jh88fan]

I have already installed XP, can I still install the drivers or does that have to be done first? The manual gives a brief description of how to enable/disable the AHCI and Native IDE modes, but mentions nothing about floppies or drivers.

[cmillar6]

you will have to do a repair install, during the repair install you can install the drivers for AHCI mode.

[XenaWP]

I tried a repair install my first time round with this issue (Build 1 with XP). It didn't work.

You can try it, but don't be surprised if it blue-screens or goes into a boot-reboot loop when you switch the drive mode in BIOS. That's what happened to me.

I just bore down and reinstalled WinXp, but there wasn't much to reinstall at the time.