I've connected a lot of SATA drives to various motherboards over the years and have never seen this behavior before.

I recently bought a 10-pack of Patriot 128 gb SSD's and none of them are "visible" on a PC running Win-XP. They show up in the BIOS as the system boots, but they don't show up in device manager or disk manager. XP boots from a 500 gb sata drive on this system, and other 128 GB drives (Lexar and Kingston) are seen no problem. The motherboard is an Intel socket-775 based CPU, sata interface on the board, no IDE interface at all. But in the BIOS I can select IDE, RAID, or AHCI for the sata mode, I have it set to IDE. When I want to clone hard drives I will use Norton Ghost 2003 (booted from a floppy) - but not in this case because Ghost can't see these SSD's either.

I've booted an old version of Acronis from a CD (and Clonezilla also from CD) and they can see these drives.

On another PC running Win-10, yes these drives are seen and can be initialized / formatted.

So why can't XP (and Ghost) see these 128 GB SSD's ?

Are there any tools I can download somewhere that can read exactly what's on these drives as they come out of the package, and maybe set a few magic bytes somewhere in a boot sector or MBR and correct this situation?

Looking at Patriot's website just now, is there a reason why they'd be saying that the OS compatability for these SSD's only goes down to Win-7?  

O/S Supported: Windows® 7*/8.0*/8.1/10

Note the * for Win-7/8.0 what's that supposed to indicate?

What's changed between XP and 7 regarding SSD / sata drives?  This particular drive isin't huge - it's not like it's a 2 or 4 tb drive.  It's only 128 gb.

Edit:  Just now I'm seeing this on reddit:

"Yea so patriot kinda changed something with their “newer” drives. They used to work with no changes to bios, ide mode and all regular, now they don’t. You sadly need to get a new ssd for it to work. The Kingston 240 gig works."

and

"I have the exact same drive and the exact same issue. I have another ssd, Lexar, and that one works perfectly. The Patriot ironically worked perfectly for win98 but WinXP won’t recognize it no matter what I do. Tried playing with modes, used a m/b F6 disk - nothing."

Those 2 comments were posted in the same r/windowsxp thread 3 months ago...

Edited January 18, 20251 yr by Nomen

Maybe they somehow can't negotiate an Ultra DMA mode? There have been drives that get stuck in the lowest DMA mode and very, very slow. Using AHCI mode would fix this.

Can you select IDE mode for the sata interface on UEFI motherboards?  Or are the sata ports going to automatically be in AHCI mode and you have no choice?

For those that have a windows system where their SATA drives are already running in AHCI mode (as set in the BIOS setup menu), it probably isin't easily testable to change the setting to IDE mode and still have the OS boot up properly. 

Unless you can change the SATA ports to IDE mode (or at least the SATA ports on a secondary controller or individual channel) then you can't test for the situation I'm describing with these Patriot SSD's.

If you're running Win-XP or possibly 7 natively (ie not in a VM) and you're running it on a system where the SATA ports are set to IDE mode, then you are perfectly set up to test the compatibility of these Patriot drives.

If I'm right, and these Patriot P210 drives require AHCI sata mode, then these would be the first SATA drives *EVER* to have this requirement / handicap.

Edited January 19, 20251 yr by Nomen

Have you tested them in AHCI mode on XP? AHCI mode has been around for long time and people were trying to use it even when it brought little to no benefit.

Edited January 19, 20251 yr by j7n

Ok I have an update.

Summary: On 2 different systems, the Patriot P210 128 gb SSD is not visible / accessible to the running OS if the SATA port is set to IDE mode.

Details - system 1:

I have Win-7 Pro SP1 installed on a WD800JB 80-gb IDE hard drive on an IBM Thinkcenter PC (this box would date to around 2004/2005 but Win-7 was installed probably 2015). The motherboard has an IDE connector and a couple of SATA connectors. The motherboard naturally is not UEFI.

In the BIOS setup of this PC is this:

Devices
IDE Drives Setup
- Parallel ATA: Primary or Disabled
- Serial ATA: Enable or Disable
- Native mode operation: Automatic or Serial ATA

Printed on-screen for that last option is this help description:

"Choose which channels will be placed in Native mode. In Automatic mode, only the serial channel is placed in Native mode, and only if necessary. Note: Some OS do not support native mode."

With the "native mode operation" set to Automatic, the Patriot SSD is not detected by Win-7. I wait for 10 minutes and Win-7 has not detected the drive. I go into Device manager and Disk manager, the drive is not there.

I reboot, go into the bios, and change "native mode operation" to Serial ATA, reboot the box, and Windows detects new hardware, installs something and then the Patriot SSD is visible, but not initialized. I have to choose MBR or GPT first to be able to do anything in Disk Manager, but I don't do anything at this point because I've established that a bios setting does influence the visibility of this SSD under Win-7 SP1. Again I suspect that this is the fundamental IDE vs AHCI issue. IBM seems to refer to AHCI as "native mode Serial ATA".

Details - system 2:

A socket 775 Intel based motherboard, no IDE interface on the board, it has a floppy drive interface and 6 sata connectors. Windows XP pro SP3 is installed on a 500 gb Seagate sata HDD. In the bios the SATA mode is set to IDE. Attaching the Patriot SSD and powering up, the SSD is not visible to XP. It doesn't show up in Drive management or Device Manager. Disconnecting the XP drive and booting Norton Ghost 2003 from a floppy same thing - no drives detected.

Change the SATA setting in the bios to AHCI, re-attach the XP drive, yes XP boots up - because I had already installed the SATA drivers for XP. But YES - the Patriot SSD is now visible. Reboot with the Ghost floppy - yes, Ghost sees the SSD.

Now - I clone the 500 gb XP HDD to the 128 gb Patriot SSD using Ghost. The XP drive is only using about 8 gb of drive space, so this is possible, destination volume is re-sized. Clone is made, AND it boots. The 128 gb Patriot SSD does boot just fine into XP.

There is something different about these Patriot SSD's that nobody will ever see if they are attached to a sysem with UEFI bios or with SATA ports set to AHCI. These drives can't be used to make clone backups of old / legacy systems or used with IDE-SATA convertor boards on systems that don't have SATA ports.

 

The 128 gb SSD's are a great size for replacing HDD's in legacy systems.  Systems with IDE ports or OS's like NT/98/2k and sometimes XP or systems with 137 gb motherboard BIOS limits.

These Patriot 128 GB SSD's seem to be the only 128 gb drives that are still widely available, Lexar and Kingston don't seem to sell them any more.  And now these Patriot drives suck and can't be used on these old systems.

Use it in AHCI mode then with the Rapid Storage driver?

Why is there a motherboard limit for 128 GB? That limit is in the OS because it accesses the disk through a driver not through the BIOS. Windows 98 has the BigLBA patch from LLXX. You can instal Windows on the disk with a reasonable sized partition and no partitions crossing the boundary, then install the PDR driver, then add more partitions.

There are Chinese SSDs that are 128 GB (decimal GBS) on AliExpress. I use XRayDisk and it is fine.

I have a Western Digital Green SSD, which is practically unusable in IDE compatibility mode at 5 MB/s speed, but works in AHCI mode. I commented about it earlier. Some of these SSDs also cannot negotiate as SATA II mode and cap at 120 MB/s, but that is fine.

I need SSD's that can be plugged into old motherboards with IDE sockets.  I have a small board that plugs directly into the IDE socket that converts it to a SATA port.  I have several SSD's (Lexar and Kingston) that are 128 gb that work fine in that position.  They are running WIN-NT4 server and 2k server.  But I acquired those SSD's a few years ago, maybe 5 years ago, and I can't get them any more (at least not in that size, not locally).

I didn't think it was going to be an issue that (some?  many?  most?) SSD's today don't work in IDE mode.  It's hard enough to find 128 gb SSD's today, and now I have to deal with this crap that you don't know which ones will work in IDE mode.

In the past few days I've acquired another 128 GB SSD (GiGimundo) and have a Kingston SSDNow V300 and Netac on the way.  

The GiGimundo does work in IDE mode, and it works fine with connected to a SATA port on one particular computer that I use for cloning, but when I plug it into the IDE-Sata adapter it seems to have problems - it takes about 5 attempts for the PC to boot win-2k from it, otherwise it fails during bootup, sometimes saying it can't find a certain file.

Edited January 24, 20251 yr by Nomen

On 1/19/2025 at 9:38 AM, Nomen said:

Can you select IDE mode for the sata interface on UEFI motherboards?

I have yet to see any board that doesn't have an IDE option. Even high end server boards still have it. That setting is not relating to the physical connection but to how IDE used to operate. 

I have an old(er) motherboard, based in Intel Broadwater chipset, I think the bios dates to 2009 (broadwater came out in 2006).  Core2 duo CPU.  It has no IDE interface, has 6 SATA ports.

I have a SATA CD/DVD drive connected to it.  Funny thing, it won't / can't boot anything from the CD drive unless I set the SATA ports to IDE mode.  Which makes it tricky to install Windoze if you are starting with the SATA ports set to IDE emulation.  I've googl'd around and this issue of a SATA optical drive not booting unless in IDE mode is not uncommon.

And - I've never seen a bios that would let you set some of the on-board SATA to AHCI (ie - native SATA) and others as IDE.

Such boards exist but are the types that would have multiple on-board storage controllers. Where certain ports are assigned to a SATA controller and others are assigned to a RAID controller. On those types of boards, you could set the SATA controller to IDE and the RAID controller to AHCI or vice-versa.

On 1/27/2025 at 4:33 PM, Nomen said:

I have an old(er) motherboard, based in Intel Broadwater chipset, I think the bios dates to 2009 (broadwater came out in 2006).  Core2 duo CPU.  It has no IDE interface, has 6 SATA ports.

I have a SATA CD/DVD drive connected to it.  Funny thing, it won't / can't boot anything from the CD drive unless I set the SATA ports to IDE mode.  Which makes it tricky to install Windoze if you are starting with the SATA ports set to IDE emulation.  I've googl'd around and this issue of a SATA optical drive not booting unless in IDE mode is not uncommon.

And - I've never seen a bios that would let you set some of the on-board SATA to AHCI (ie - native SATA) and others as IDE.

The solution may be to install a PCI card with SATA adapters. Those based on the ASMedia 1061 chip have a switch to choose "No boot," "IDE mode," or "AHCI." This might work with other chipsets, but they don't have a switch to choose the mode.
I haven't tested them yet, so I can't comment further...

I saw some comments on amazon from other people also having issues with XP and IDE on patriot SSDs and led me to this post among others.  I'm curious what model/chipset yours was running.  I bought a Patriot Burst Elite 120GB and an ADATA SU655 120GB for an older retro PC and both worked for me either as fresh install or as secondary drive.  I used XP with the latest 2019 updates.  Tested on a FM2 motherboard with SATA port, 939 motherboard with ATA133, and socket7 motherboard with ATA33.

ADATA was a MAS0902 controller based on the info from JMicron tool from: http://vlo.name:3000/ssdtool/
Patriot was some type of Phison based on a similar firmware version from different a model: https://smarthdd.com/database/Patriot-P210-128GB/HDFED3.2/

 

Patriot Burst Elite 120GB (Phison ??):
PRO Can use HPA (host protected area)
PRO Detailed attributes
CON works with SATA-IDE, ATA133 and ATA33 with adapter, but massive slowdown!

 

ADATA SU655 120GB (MAS0902):
CON Can not set HPA!
CON Minimal attributes, temp reading also fluctuated to below room temp!
PRO works with SATA-IDE, ATA133 and ATA33 with adapter, normal slowdown