Basically I'm going to be getting a new system early next week (first one in a while), and although I've done quite a bit of reading on SATA over the last week I do have a few lingering questions. I'm hoping that those of you on here who've had more recent and thorough experience with various SATA setups may be able to clarify these points for me. My last PC didn't have SATA, so I never really had any need to have answers to my current questions, so bear with me if some of them have been "done to death" (although searching didn't really turn up concrete answers to my specific questions).
My new system will have an Asus P5K-E/WiFi-AP motherboard, which uses the Intel P35 chipset and ICH9R southbridge w/ 6 SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports. It also has a JMicron® JMB363 controller which provides two eSATA 3.0 Gb/s ports (both of which are on the rear panel) and a regular Ultra DMA connector for older PATA devices.
Ideally, I'd like to set both the ICH9R and JMicron SATA controllers to AHCI mode as opposed to IDE-emulation so that my Seagate 500GB's NCQ-feature will be taken advantage of... and everything I've read indicates that this needs to be done prior to/during the installation of Windows XP. Primarily, I have two questions related to this issue:
1. Since haven't used 3.5" floppies for quite some time and can't use the F6 disk option, I'm going to use nLite to make a new XP CD and slipstream AHCI drivers for both the ICH9R and JMicron controllers... however, I have the option of including the RAID drivers for both as well. Should I bother with this... will Windows know which one to use based on what I've set the controllers to in the BIOS, or will this simply confuse the installation process?
2. I'm going to be connecting two optical drives to the PATA connector of the JMicron controller... a Lite-On SHM-165H6S DVD burner as primary and Lite-On SOHC-5235K combo as slave. What I'm wondering about this is will setting the JMicron controller to AHCI impact the functionality of devices connected to its PATA port? Based on the motherboard's manual, the BIOS doesn't distinguish between these two ports, and simply gives the option to set the JMicron controller to [IDE], [AHCI], or [RAID]. Personally, I can't see how a Ultra DMA port could function in AHCI mode, so up to now I've assumed that the BIOS setting applies only to the eSATA ports and leaves the PATA alone... though I'd appreciate it if someone could confirm that.
Hey there.
Windows XP does not reconize Sata becasue sata wasnt very big when it came out, so the new VIsta does without a rpoblem, So in that case you do need to get the updated drivers for the board to make sure xp will reconize. As for the Pata issue, you wont have a problem the bios does reconize pata and sata as merely just drives. (on the opening screen) where it lists all connected devices it will just list drive 1, drive 2, drive 3, drive 4, and so on.
"XP does not recognise SATA" - I'm confused. S-ATA hard drives work at the Windows XP installer, even without any service packs on the disc. It recognises them fine. All the S-ATA processing is done by the JMicron controller so all XP sees is 'a hard disk'.
