Hard drive confusion

[BPB]

I've got a question that may appear to be dumb, but I hope it isn't. When using a SATA II hard drive will it run at top speed if the controller is set to look like and IDE drive? If not, how should the controller be setup? I have two 320GB Seagate SATA II drives and I do not feel the need for a RAID setup. I do not know the best way to use the drives given all the BIOS options. My motherboard is an ASUS P5W Deluxe, which uses the Intel 975X chipset. Thanks for any advice.

 

[WildHorse]

how should the controller be setup?

Not exactly sure what you have in mind giving rise to your question.

They're just "Plug 'n Play."

There's no set up required, other than checking the manufacturer's website for any possible firmware updates for your drive model.

I've never had to do any "controller setup."

 

[BPB]

Well, that wasn't the case for me when installing my dual-boot setup. I run Windows MCE 2005 and Vista Ultimate. I could not install MCE 2005 without setting the controller to Standard IDE. Here's what the manual has for the controller:

Configure SATA as [Standard IDE]
Sets the configuration for the Serial ATA connectors supported by the Southbridge chip.

The AHCI allows the onboard storage driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features that increases storage performance on random workloads by allowing the drive to internally optimize the order of commands.

If you want to create a RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, or the Intelâ Matrix Storage Technology configuration from the Serial ATA hard disk drives, set this item to [RAID].

If you wanbt to use the Serial ATA hard disk drives as Parallel ATA physical storage devices, keep the default setting [Standard IDE].

If you want the Serial ATA hard disk drives to use the Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI), set this item to [AHCI].

I presume that in order to get the most out of the drives I want to set the controller to AHCI, but I am wondering if I need to because I'm not sure my system will boot. At least I know that when I last played with these settings I couldn't get the BIOS to boot properly unless I had the drives as IDE. But I know that shouldn't be necessary.

 

[Fraggable]

Windows XP will only recognize IDE drives natively, that's why it's an option in BIOS. To get the most our of your SATA2 drives, BIOS should be set to SATA mode.

To get Windows to install on a SATA drive in SATA mode, here's what you have to do:

1) Install a floppy drive on the system if you haven't already
2) Make a floppy disk with the SATA drivers for the system board - there's usually a utility on the CD that came with the board that will generate one of these floppies - obviously, you have to do this on a working system with a floppy drive. If you're lucky, they might have even packaged this floppy with the board
3) Set BIOS to boot from the CD drive first
4) Boot to the Windows CD and watch the bottom of the screen. One of the first things it will say it something like 'Press F6 to install SCSI/RAID drivers blahblahblah). Press F6 when you see this.
5) It will load a bunch of drivers, then give an option to press 'S' to install special SCSI drivers. put your floppy that you just created in the floppy drive and press 'S'. Select the appropriate drivers from the list that comes up and move on with your Windows installation.

 

[BPB]

Therein lies my problem. I don't have a floppy and really would rather not install one. Besides, I've already installed the 2 OSes. I wonder if I can install the drivers now and then change the BIOS? I would think there's a good chance that will work.