GA-EP35-DS3R SATA confusion

[DonH]

I am almost hopelessly confused by the SATA on this board. I want the hard drives to operate in SATA 3Gb/s mode. Boot drive is connected to SATAII0 the others to SATAII1, 4 and 5. I am not setting up RAID. I installed Vista SP1 and then the drivers from the drivers disk.

Everything is working fine, but... the drives are being reported as IDE Master and Slave? Did I need to install the driver before installing Vista? It seemed like that was only needed for RAID?

I'd rather not have to reinstall Vista and programs, but I don't want bottlenecks either. Any advise?

[Toadeater]

Re: GA-EP35-DS3R SATA confusion

The ports are running in IDE emulation mode, but that doesn't limit your bandwidth. SATA's "native" features don't improve performance of desktop systems much. You can still switch to AHCI mode if you want.

Error message when you start a Windows Vista-based computer after you change the SATA mode of the boot drive: "STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE"

[DonH]

Re: GA-EP35-DS3R SATA confusion

Thanks for confirming what I thought I was experiencing...the drives responsiveness seemed very good.

I also appreciate the MS article. It's good to know that I COULD change to AHCI if I want to without having to start all over!

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: GA-EP35-DS3R SATA confusion

Just so you know AHCI's best feature (NCQ) is already enabled by default for vista anyway with or without the drivers so you are good to go.