Hard Drive Appearing as IDE in Windows 7

[j4mi3]

Hey guys my WD Caviar Black 500gb sata drive is appearing in IDE mode in my bios of my asus m4a78 pro motherboard. The section which it is in, i have two other options, one of which is raid. should i select this and will this make it become recognisable as a sata drive? Also in device manager in windows 7 when i click properties on the drive, in device description drop down bar it says it is an IDE drive when it clearly is not. What do i need to do? Thanks

 

[roonj]

You don't need to do anything, it's a Sata drive running in Ide mode which is normal.
The other options were to install as a Raid system or Achi system.
Don't do anything you did fine.

 

[j4mi3]

ok thanks. i never seen this before and i presumed sata had nothing to do with ide so i was shocked to see any reference to it really. just a question though, why is it running in 'ide' mode? surely it should run in 'sata mode' if that exists XD cheers

p.s. out of interest what are your system specs

 

[roonj]

Sata is a serial interface providing additional channels/addresses for data as compared with earlier Ide interface, Intelligent device interface. You are running in Sata mode as this is a feature of the hardware.

I currently run with a AM3/AM2+ board with PII x3 720 chip and ddr2 memory. Luckily I got a 0904 dated chip so all 4 cores work. I have both Ide and Sata drives, XP on the ide and multiboot Vista, Win7 on the Sata.

 

[tcsenter]

The closest thing to SATA mode is called ACHI, which can be glitchy. IDE mode uses older proven software and programming model (e.g. drivers) which doesn't affect the transfer rate or performance of SATA.

 

[roonj]

Achi is a Sata mode which enables NCQ (native command que) and supposedly hot-plugging of said device. As I understand it achi allows the drive to collect data during reads in a more predictive manner. Apparently it's able to hold a larger model of file requests and can collect upcoming requests along the way to it's target requests. While the intel chipset is quite good at this function unfortunately the amd chipset including the newest SB750 is buggy. It's nowhere near as fast as the intel version either. Amd just recently included the achi download on their website for the first time along with the 09/10/09 video update files. They do say it's there for retail AMD boards and imply it's not for the OEM's but probobly going to try it to compare as the system file is much larger than all previous versions, hoping they added something.

 

[mikrev007]

psst... [A]dvanced [H]ost [C]ontroller nterface