SATA Drives Showing Up as IDE Drives?

[imported_Nicko]

Hi all

Just bought myself an MSI RS482M4-ILD micro ATX board, for a small media box I am making. Anyway, I have a Western Digital 250Gb SATA drive, and an e-SATA external drive. However, the WD internal drive does not show up like it does with nVidia chipset boards (with the hot-pluggable icon in the system tray) and neither does the external one - I have to restart my PC with the external plugged in for the system to recognize it, it doesn't appear to be hot-pluggable? When I go into device manager to look for my drives under the hard drive controllers, they are not there, so I cannot enable/disable NCQ, test burst speeds etc. It appears the drives are being recognized as IDE drives.

When I go into my bios, it has the following options under "SATA devices configuration" :

- SATA as RAID
- SATA as storage
- SATA as IDE, which is default

Now, I changed to the "SATA as storage" option, reinstalled Windows, making sure to install the SATA Raid drivers that came on the floppy disk with my motherboard during the initial installation of Windows XP SP2. Now, my internal drive is recognised as an SCSI drive, again I cannot find it under a SATA hard drive controller in device manager. And my external is still not hot-pluggable.

Does anybody have any suggestions? Thanks...

 

[Bobthelost]

Not all motherboards/chipsets allow hot swapping, does yours?

NCQ is a bad thing for home systems, you need server type access patterns (no you do not have these) for NCQ to be worthwhile.

Short version: Live with it

 

[imported_Nicko]

I thought hot-swapping was a SATA spec, not a motherboard spec?

NCQ is enabled by default, I want to disable it but cannot get to it as I do using nVidia platform motherboards (as opposed to this one which uses an ATI chipset). I also want to check (via the speed tests, which I am also able to do on my nVidia board) whether my drive, which is showing up as an SCSI drive, is running at SATA 150 speeds, or whether performance is being hindered by the "incorrect" recognition of the drive as SCSI?

Finally, I can live with my internal drive masquarading as a, SCSI drive (unless performance is massively downgraded). However, not being able to hot-plug my external drive using eSATA is a major pain - USB is too slow to transfer the large video files.

 

[Bobthelost]

I know that in some boards (the early ones for sure) that it was not. Yours makes no comment at all about hotswapping on the MSI website, nor does it do so in the manual.

NCQ enabled by default? That's a new one on me, it's been set to default status of off in every case i've heard of, how do you know? Also since your motherboard doesn't have NCQ listed on the features set i'm very dubious. It's a SATA 1.0 motherboard.

Download HD tach and run a sustained read/write test then check that it's what it's supposed to. If you start complaining that you're not getting 1.5gbps then i'm going to give up

 

[imported_Nicko]

My experience with motherboards and SATA hard drives all stems from using the nForce 3 and 4 chipset boards. I have never used a SATA drive on a motherboard using a different chipset to this, so don't know what to expect really. On those boards, NCQ is enabled as default.

Also, none of those boards recognize my drive as an SCSI drive. Is this normal, or is something wrong? This board I am using is a socket 939 board - surely it is not that "early"?

 

[Bobthelost]

How do you know it's got NCQ enabled? It makes no mention of NCQ in your manual and as such i don't think it is enabled by default since you don't have it at all. Did you even read my post?

 

[imported_Nicko]

Do you not understand English? Unfortunately it is the only language I speak, and I cannot put it more clearly! As far as I know, NCQ is not a motherboard feature, but rather a SATA feature. Of course, I may be wrong on this. No board I have ever seen has mentioned "Supports NCQ" as a feature or specification. Come to mention it, I have never seen "SATA hot-swapping" as a feature or specification mentioned either.

Secondly, I did read you post, which says, and I quote "NCQ enabled by default? That's a new one on me, it's been set to default status of off in every case i've heard of, how do you know?". I just told you the cases I have come across where NCQ is enabled as default. I make no mention of whether NCQ is enabled or disabled on my drive in this PC - what I want is a way of checking!

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: Nicko
Of course, I may be wrong on this.

Have no fear, you are.

Originally posted by: Nicko
No board I have ever seen has mentioned "Supports NCQ" as a feature or specification. Come to mention it, I have never seen "SATA hot-swapping" as a feature or specification mentioned either.

Look harder. It's there if you look at the details. Or rather it's not there for your motherboard.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot.../Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2314

The SATA specification doubles bus bandwidth from 1.5Gb/s to 3Gb/s. Native Command Queuing is a new specification that enables out-of-order execution of commands for efficient retrieval of data. Hot Plug support allows users to insert and remove hard disk drives without shutting off power to the system.

Originally posted by: Nicko
I just told you the cases I have come across where NCQ is enabled as default. I make no mention of whether NCQ is enabled or disabled on my drive in this PC - what I want is a way of checking!

NF3 and 4? They have NCQ disabled as the default setting for every case i've seen and heard of. They did implement hot swapping before most other controllers did, but the idea of setting NCQ up to be default active is a bad one, since it damages performance (bad press for the company).

You do not have NCQ activated as you have SATA 1.0 ports on your board (see your manual for details 2-17). Read here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/is_2_25/ai_n13787815 for more information about the way the SATA and SATA II interfaces are different.

Summary:You have SATA 1.0 ports, you do not have NCQ capability, active or inactive. You cannot do hot swaping on your motherboard and the appearance of your drives as SCSI are nothing to cause concern. If you want to check any of this then download HD tach and compare them to other results easily found using google. If your scores are notably lower than those posted then we can see if there are any problems to be sorted.

 

[supaidaaman]

ive got a WD3200KS with no raid, the option "enable command queuing" is checked to be on in the properties...should i disable this to improve speed?

EDIT just ran HD tach and
Burst speed is 200.8
random access 14.1
average read 50.9

 

[xgsound]

I believe the differences you are noticing between Nvidia and ATI chipsets are normal.

If you want to hot swap the external drive consider this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816132007 It has an e-sata external connector. Please check further to be sure that it supports hot swaping in combination with your chipset. I do NOT use this device personally, but it gives you more info to work with.


Jim

 

[IEC]

Originally posted by: Bobthelost

Originally posted by: Nicko
Of course, I may be wrong on this.

Have no fear, you are.

Originally posted by: Nicko
No board I have ever seen has mentioned "Supports NCQ" as a feature or specification. Come to mention it, I have never seen "SATA hot-swapping" as a feature or specification mentioned either.

Look harder. It's there if you look at the details. Or rather it's not there for your motherboard.
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot.../Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=2314

The SATA specification doubles bus bandwidth from 1.5Gb/s to 3Gb/s. Native Command Queuing is a new specification that enables out-of-order execution of commands for efficient retrieval of data. Hot Plug support allows users to insert and remove hard disk drives without shutting off power to the system.

Originally posted by: Nicko
I just told you the cases I have come across where NCQ is enabled as default. I make no mention of whether NCQ is enabled or disabled on my drive in this PC - what I want is a way of checking!

NF3 and 4? They have NCQ disabled as the default setting for every case i've seen and heard of. They did implement hot swapping before most other controllers did, but the idea of setting NCQ up to be default active is a bad one, since it damages performance (bad press for the company).

You do not have NCQ activated as you have SATA 1.0 ports on your board (see your manual for details 2-17). Read here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/is_2_25/ai_n13787815 for more information about the way the SATA and SATA II interfaces are different.

Summary:You have SATA 1.0 ports, you do not have NCQ capability, active or inactive. You cannot do hot swaping on your motherboard and the appearance of your drives as SCSI are nothing to cause concern. If you want to check any of this then download HD tach and compare them to other results easily found using google. If your scores are notably lower than those posted then we can see if there are any problems to be sorted.

QFT... FTW.

SCSI is just what the SATA drives are detected as, it's nothing to be concerned about. And like the previous poster said, SATA 1.0 doesn't support NCQ.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: supaidaaman
ive got a WD3200KS with no raid, the option "enable command queuing" is checked to be on in the properties...should i disable this to improve speed?

EDIT just ran HD tach and
Burst speed is 200.8
random access 14.1
average read 50.9

I would uncheck it, it's not going to help you in the slightest (hell repeat the test if you're bored). Your numbers sound about right so nothing is going horribly wrong at least.

 

[corkyg]

As long as they work, I wouldn't be too concerned about what they are called. Mine are called SCSI by my mobo. My laptop calls them IDE - and in fact, SATA drives are IDE. That's why we use PATA to differentiate. Both have Integrated Drive Electronics.

 

[Zepper]

As Corky said, "SATA and PATA are both IDE drives." When you use the SATA as IDE drive setting, windows will recognize it as an IDE drive, when you enable the raid functions as in "SATA used as Storage" which means you intend to perhaps use it in Spanned volume (aka JBOD) SATA will appear as SCSI because the controller acts similarly to SCSI. So change the setting back to SATA as IDE and be happy.

.bh.