nVidia Nforce 4 IDE drivers & SATA II Hard Disks!

[sik1977]

I have two systems both with the MSI K8N NEO4 Platinum which has SATAII support. One system has a Western Digital SATAII 200Gb HD and the other has a Seagate SATAII 160GB HDD.

I installed the nForce4 Mobo drivers (6.66/6.67 WHQL sets) and if I install the nVidia IDE drivers that come with the package, the 'Safely Remove Hardware' Icon starts appearing in the windows task bar and shows the Hard Disks as removable media (though they cannot be removed).

If i subsequently uninstall the nVidia IDE driver (or not install it from the pachage) windows installs its IDE drivers and the task bar icon doesn't appear.

My questions are as follows:

1. Why does the 'Safely Remove Hardware' Icon starts appearing in the windows task bar if I install the nVidia IDE drivers, showing my Hard Disk as removeable media?
2. Is it better to not install the nVidia IDE drivers, I heard that they can cause compatability issues with some software?
3. Is there any advantage to installing nVidia IDE drivers instead of letting windows install the IDE drivers, keeping in view the fact that I have a single SATAII Hard Disk (in each system) & a LiteOn DVD-RW drive (in each system)?
4. Any other useful info?

Thanks a lot for the help.

P.s' I wasn't sure if I this si the right forum to post or whether the motherboard forum would be more appropriate, So I may copy this to both forums.

 

[emogoch]

This is the right place. As for yourquestions:
1) The SATAII specificationallows for SATAII hard drives to be hot-swapable. That means you can add and remove them at will why the system is pluged in (Think iPod like). The difference in your case is that the SATA drive is also the system drive. So at a hardware level, the disks support hot swapping, and hence the icon appears. However, if you actually try to swap them, the Windows OS will kick in when you try the icon, realize that it's a system drive and is in use, and won't disconnect it. I have the same thing happen in my computer.

2) With the IDE drivers, I think you get some extra maintanence options that you don't get without the drivers. (Bring up the device manager, and check out each of the controllers properties to see what I mean). As for software issues. For a brief while, I thought that they may have been a problem for me when I was trying to burn DVDs, but even without them, I was getting the same problem. Other than that, I havne't noticed and problems with them, so I say that really it's your own choice on whether you use them or not.

3) See above

4) Not that I can think of, but if you have any more questions, post them.

 

[sik1977]

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. Very much appreciated.