Can a SATA Drive Function in IDE Mode?

[Arsynic]

I keep hearing people having to do all kinds of funky stuff with the BIOS in order to get the SATA working. However, I just plugged my HDD into the SATA port and the computer recognized it at bootup. Hell, it even went a step further and I could install WinXP on the drive without installing any drivers. However, when I go to PC Mark or SiSoft Sandra, it says my HDD interface is IDE. What's the problem here?

 

[mrwxyz]

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1351337&highlight_key=y&keyword1=sata