Windows 7 Intel drivers support

This thing is too fast for it's own good perhaps? I don't know why it speeds past the polling, but I suppose it time to go into BIOS. Do you know whose BIOS is in the machine? I can only map Award- Phoenix for you. (4 Gigabyte boards with Award- Phoenix BIOS and a locked down Intel/Emachines). The Award BIOS always displays the IDE channels and designates the devices on those busses.

Ok. So I went into BIOS and this is what I got:

Primary IDE Master / Primary IDE Slave Not Detected.

SATA2 -> Lists my HDD model.

I went into Storage Configuration:

On Chip SATA Channel - Enabled
On Chip SATA Type - IDE (The other modes listed were AHCI and RAID).

Should I simply change that to AHCI or are there other pre-requisites.

Thanks.

First Rit; I'm sorry for conking out on you last night. It was 2:00 AM here in Philly.

The bad news is that you must reinstall the OS to have the drives function in ACHI. If you don't do it this way, you get all sorts of goofy results such as the necessity of forcing Windows to redetect eSata HDDs every time you plug them in.

Some boards have limits for the number of drives that can be run in IDE BUT, that is something that is a bit fuzzy in the manuals I've read. TMagic has told me that even SATA optical drives can be run as IDE. (I've always bought IDE DVD drives, since I figure why waste a good IDE buss when a SATA optical would waste a perfectly good HDD port). With Blu-Ray the data transfer rate is much higher, so those drives might benefit from the speed of a true SATA interface.

I believe that IDE is the default mode for BIOS by most manufacturers, since it can be run without 3rd party drivers by Win XP. Yes, there's so much XP out there, it still must be catered to.

If reinstalling Windows 7 is something you don't mind doing. there may be an improvement in boot time with the HDDs running in ACHI, but I'm not really sure. At least you'll take full advantage of the controllers in your board, in being able to use them to their full capacity. Now all you need is a few more HDDs to fill the sucker up......

Hi Cap! No problems.

I had been reading a little on the subject. Most people seem to think that if one is running a single HDD the default IDE mode is the most suitable. There are no perceivable benefits in switching to AHCI from IDE. I had thought that data transfer rates would be dramatically different but it appears I was wrong.

What are your opinions?

Well, many people are sort of stuck in XP thinking, The aggravation of installing SATA drivers during XP install sort of of points everybody toward IDE emulation.

This works and works well. But, there are certain limitations. IDE emulation runs @ ATA100 (100MBs), this is not the fastest PATA mode. Before SATA became the norm, the fastest PATA drives were "ATA-133".

At 100MBs a second you do start to run into mechanical HDDs that can read this fast.

So, IDE emulation is certainly not better than AHCI. And I suppose that only you can determine if it's worth the trouble to reinstall the OS to take advantage of SATA 300.

I can say I wouldn't ever run a new machine with Windows 7 with the HDDs in IDE, it's become too damned easy not to.

With the SATA controller in SATA you would be able to use it's full capacity, plus the normally supplied 2 device IDE buss. In most boards that's 7 or 8 drives total.

I don't know the the idea that it's not worth it because there's only one HDD holds water, since it may not always be this way, and you get hot swap with ACHI. You can plug in external eSata HDDs on the fly.

In fact you should be able to hot plug internal HDDs in AHCI also. With that said, I'm much too inhibited to try this, nor do I condone others attempting it either.

Thanks Captain and mailpup.

I intend to format my system in a while so maybe I'll go with AHCI. Just one question though, is AHCI noticeably faster than IDE. Like transferring large files, installing games, etc.?

I've recently reinstalled my PC with ACHI settings enabled in bios (which I prompty failed to do so during previous installation :rolleyes: ). Anyways, I haven't bothered to benchmark the difference in read/write speeds of both modes, but in general, the system seems to be slightly more 'responsive', if that is what you want to know.