Hi

I will soon upgrade my system, and am worried about the sata thing.

Mobo : Gigabyte EP45-DS3L

Hd : Hitachi Deskstar P7K500 (Serial ATA-II)

It seems south bridge takes care of sata, and it's an Intel® ICH10

IDE is handled by JMicron 368 chip

I guess I should integrate Intel drivers anyway but I've read various posts here, and im not sure, as some people get bsod etc... And I'm not planning to use RAID (n/a on this mobo anyway), nor AHCI (as it seems there are only few advantages).

So am I wrong if I :

- set the HD to IDE mode (or non AHCI or whatever)(is this option available on any mobo/bios btw ?)

- plug the HD using sata cable (it can be plugged with sata, but used in IDE mode, right ?)(weird)

Or do I really miss something/will face performance loss etc

Thanks

I just completed a new build around a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R mobo on a WD 1.5GB SATA hard drive using an nLite'd SP2 install disk (nLite was only used to slipstream SP2). I did not need to integrate SATA or RAID drivers (it's not set up for RAID use), nor did I need to do anything fancy with the BIOS settings to convince the mobo that the drive was an IDE instead of what it actually is.

The important part here is that your installation CD needs to be of SP2 or higher. XP Gold and SP1 do not have the SATA support needed, so the drivers would have to be added only if you're using one of those.

Post back and let us know of your results.

Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah I downloaded the manual, and by default, the bios is set to "pata(ide) mode", that's why you didn't encounter any problem

I should have noted that I DID have to fight through the problem about 2 years ago using a single SATA drive on an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe board. The only way I could find to get around the issue (the XP SP2 installation's first reboot led to the SATA drive no longer being detected) was to use the official Microsoft 6-disk bootdisk set they offer for XP gold, SP1 & SP2. They don't have one for SP3 or Vista systems, nor do they have any plans to ever make them available. You can download the file below, if you'd like to play it safe this time around.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994

I had no such problem installing to any IDE based hard drive on that same mobo.