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NVIDIA IDE SW drivers

Most people don't have problems with them, but some do. The nVidia IDE driver allows Windows to properly recognize the Serial ATA controllers as opposed to seeing them as a bunch of single channel Parallel ATA controllers. It enables more features to be used, like RAID, NCQ, hot-swap, etc. It's not essential to your computer, and as for performance, it boosts some peoples and lowers others in comparison to the super old Microsoft driver.

I recommend you install it, and only stop using it if you encounter problems. You may want to disable NCQ though, as that has a real performance impact.
 
The Nvidia IDE drives are supposed to utilize less CPU resources and provide slightly better performance than the MS drivers. The problems are usually obvious, and usually involve not being able to boot into Windows after installing them, or unable to burn to optical drives.

The perfomance increase is continually debated, although my system seems to be more responsive with the Nvidia drivers. I've always used them and never had a problem on both NF2 and NF3 boards.
 
Continuity, what is the NCQ thing?

Blue, I guess what I'll do is, reinstall everything, make a basic image of my drive, with the most basic settings, then ill reinstall these guys (along with nVidia's firewall).
See how this all works out.
 
I recommend you install it, and only stop using it if you encounter problems. You may want to disable NCQ though, as that has a real performance impact.
Click to expand...

Yep,also remember the big one which is the Nvidia firewall, this has given many users too many errors and headaches.
 
Originally posted by: kuba
Continuity, what is the NCQ thing?

Blue, I guess what I'll do is, reinstall everything, make a basic image of my drive, with the most basic settings, then ill reinstall these guys (along with nVidia's firewall).
See how this all works out.
Click to expand...

I guess the best way I can explain NCQ is to imagine that you have a stack of papers in front of you, labelled 1 - 10. They are arranged like:

6, 1, 10, 2, 7, 4, 8, 3, 9, 5

You don't need to read them in numerical order, they were just placed there in numerical order. Normal hard disks would go from 1 - 10, because that was the original order (queue) of operations. You notice that the hard drive would need to do many unnecessary motions to get all 10 in order. What NCQ does is allow the hard drive to reprioritize to help improve performance by allowing it to receive more I/O requests so the hard drive can decide which to use first. In this case the hard drive would go 6, 1, 10, etc etc. The problem is this extra logic increases the overhead, so single operations like "pick up 4" take longer.

That's why NCQ is great for server environments but not so great for normal everyday home PCs that only game and such.

To disable it, go to Control Panel -> System -> Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers -> Serial ATA Controller (s) Properties. Find the NCQ settings in there (Command Queuing, Native Command Queuing, Tagger Command Queuing, whatever it may be called.) Disable that for all your hard drives and restart.
 
If your motherboard is anything like mine, don't bother with them. I have seen numerous BSODs myself having used these drivers. The ASUS site even states you must pair a certain BIOS with a certain NVIDIA driver, obviously meaning there are some incompabilities. I would stay away from them because:

1. NCQ offers ~2%? increase in performance and sometimes even a decrease.
2. Stability problems.
3. One more driver to load at startup.
4. It sticks the 'safely remove device' icon in your system tray because it supports hot-plugging. I personally find that icon annoying.

Perhaps the NF2/NF3 IDE drivers were fine but many have problems with the SW IDE drivers for the NF4, the chipset upon which your motherboard is based. Can someone provide a link stating where these drivers increase performance over the default atapi.sys IDE compatibility driver? It's worth noting, for Linux, the sata_nv module also freezes my PC. Only the IDE compatibility driver operates in Linux for me. I have the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce 4 SLI Rev A3).

The other NVIDIA drivers however work just fine for me. The firewall doesn't corrupt downloads like some reported, and the SMBus driver is fine. But the SW IDE is poison for my mobo. Others have also reported NCQ corrupted their hard disk. That didn't happen to me, only problems with crashes.
 
The only nvidia drivers I install are graphics (obviously) and ethernet. I've had nothing but problems with the other ones.. BSODs, slow downs, etc, leading me to have to completely reformat. It's not worth the risk to me.
 
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