Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
The SATA controller mode setting is of particular importance. This setting controls how SATA hard
drives function and appear to the system and can have a major effect on OS installation and driver
issues.
One of the requirements of SATA is that it be capable of fully emulating ATA. This means that a
SATA drive should be able to be supported by the same drivers and software as Parallel ATA
drives. Although this is true, adherence to this would mean that additional capabilities such as native
command queuing could never be supported. To support features beyond standard ATA, SATA has a
more powerful “native” mode interface called AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface).
The SATA controller on most motherboards has three modes of operation:
•
IDE mode
—Provides legacy ATA emulation with no AHCI or RAID support
•
AHCI mode
—Provides support for native SATA functionality without RAID
•
RAID mode
—Provides both RAID and AHCI support
Any OS or software that supports standard ATA drives also supports SATA drives if the host adapter
is set to IDE mode. This means that, for example, you can install Windows on a SATA drive without
having to press the F6 key to specify and load additional drivers. However, if you choose AHCI or
RAID/AHCI modes, the standard ATA drivers will not work, and you will need AHCI/RAID drivers
instead. So if you are installing Windows on a system with a SATA host adapter set to AHCI or
RAID mode and Windows does not recognize the drive, you need to press the F6 key and install the
AHCI/RAID drivers. Windows XP and earlier only support loading these drivers from a floppy disk,
whereas Windows Vista and later support optical drives as well as USB drives (including flash
drives). Note that Windows Vista and later include AHCI/RAID drivers for many SATA host
adapters on the installation DVD; it is also possible to integrate these drivers into Windows XP
