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It appears that I'm not the only one with such question, but Googling revealed nothing.
For many contemporary ASUS (maybe other manufacturers too?) motherboards there is a setting in BIOS called "ATA/IDE Configuration", which has three options - Disabled, Compatible and Enhanced. If you choose "Enhanced", you also get a choice for "Enhanced mode support on" and then three choices: S-ATA, P-ATA and S-ATA+P-ATA.
I'd like to make sure my SATA drive runs with full AHCI goodness, but which setting do I chose (and on a side note: how can I tell what mode my HDD is running - PATA or SATA)?
(Note: my particular motherboard is P5G41T-M LX with the Intel G41 chipset).
Added: Ok, tried some experiments. Tried all three settings in Enhanced. Whatever I did, didn't affect Windows 7 device manager, although think an additional "ATA Channel" appeared under the SATA+PATA setting (unused though).
Currently in the Device Manager tree there is a node called "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" under which there are 6 subnodes:
- ATA Channel 0
- ATA Channel 0
- ATA Channel 1
- ATA Channel 1
- Intel(R) 82801G (ICH7 Family) Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 27DF
- Intel(R) 82081GB/GR/GH (ICH7 Familiy) Serial ATA Storage Controller - 27C0
Yes, that's right, there are two of "ATA Channel 0" and "ATA Channel 1". Also, under the first one of "ATA Channel 0" it is written that it supports 2 devices and it lists my DVD-ROM as UDMA4. Under the second "ATA Channel 0" lives my HDD in UDMA5. Note that BIOS also detected the drive as UDMA5. The drive itself is a Samsung HD403LJ.
I also tried the Windows 7 enable AHCI hack with the mode set to Enhanced/SATA in BIOS. Still no effect.
Perhaps my drive already is in AHCI mode and I just don't know it?
Disabled turns off the whole ATA controller. Compatible is legacy-legacy (and don't support more than 4 disks overall), while Enhanced sub-settings should be a particular mixes of combined mode. Last but not least, there are workarounds for BIOS limitations, and there are legends on SATA+PATA+TRIM. – mirh – 2017-02-19T14:20:17.857
I have never seen a board that did it this way (which is why I answered basically the exact opposite). Which vendor's BIOS lists it this way? – Shinrai – 2011-05-03T14:13:27.597
My OS is Windows 7. I've tried several options, but my SATA HDD stays under the same "ATA Channel 0" as my PATA DVD-RW drive. It's also listed in UDMA5 mode. I understand that I need the "Enhanced/PATA" mode then, to have my HDD as AHCI and CD-ROM as PATA? Kinda tried this now, but still no effect. – Vilx- – 2011-05-03T14:23:04.157
Intel hardware documentation. Of course, BIOS could mean different things with these terms, but on the (non-intel) systems I've seen a BIOS, "IDE/ATA Configuration" was separate from SATA configuration, and was really concerned about what appears on the ATA/IDE ports.
So configuring IDE/ATA to support SATA means that SATA as its own entity (ie. AHCI) was disabled, and provided SATA via the legacy/compatibility IDE interfaces. – Patrick Georgi – 2011-05-03T14:24:41.813
@Patrick - You might be right on this one, since it seems laid out a bit oddly, but that's not an across-the-board standard for sure. I've seen motherboards where the options are explicitly 'Compatibility' and 'AHCI', haha. I guess @Vilx should try disabling this and see if that gets his hard drive working in AHCI mode... – Shinrai – 2011-05-03T14:29:59.133
BIOS is free to not enable AHCI in the first place. While the system could override this (and force-enable AHCI), no production Operating System does so. (and I doubt the Intel drivers would do it, they specify that only BIOS may change that configuration) – Patrick Georgi – 2011-05-03T14:32:43.803
@Patrick - Doh! There's my new-machine bias talking. It didn't even occur to me that this might not support AHCI, period. Now that I've looked, the southbridge on this machine is the Intel ICH7 which does NOT SUPPORT AHCI, which explains the bizarre wording of this option. Deleting my answer, will upvote yours when you clarify. – Shinrai – 2011-05-03T14:41:21.843
@Shinrai - updat--wait... WHAT?!?!?!?!? NO AHCI AT ALL?!?!?!? But, but, but, but... and it's my work machine too, and the board was given by the sysadmins (the old one broke), so I can't change it, so... [censored]. :'( – Vilx- – 2011-05-03T14:45:24.917
@Vilx - Yeah, that sucks. :/ – Shinrai – 2011-05-03T14:45:59.750
@Shinrai - weird... I just tried AIDA64, and it shows that my CPU support hardware virtualization, when Wikipedia's page clearly shows that the G41 chipset does not support it. Some other utility called "Securable" also says I have it, and the BIOS also has a setting related to it. AIDA64 also shows that the disk supports NCQ. I'm confused. – Vilx- – 2011-05-03T14:57:05.000
1The disk supports it, but the controller doesn't support the protocol necessary for that. It may be the southbridge (some ICH models support AHCI, some don't, and the model name doesn't state it), it may be the BIOS that disables AHCI even though it would work on that hardware. A tool (like AIDA) that queries the disk about its capabilities gets told what the disk can do theoretically, not what it can do on this controller. – Patrick Georgi – 2011-05-03T15:02:17.163
Well, I suspected as much about the disk (though I couldn't find anything about the controller). But that does not explain the virtualization weirdness. :P – Vilx- – 2011-05-03T15:04:05.790
What @Patrick said, and the same applies for the virtualization thing. You're SOL at this point, I'm afraid. – Shinrai – 2011-05-03T15:04:25.653
@Shinrai - OK. But I'm really confused because everything tells me that hardware virtualization is enabled. Giving up on NCQ though. :P – Vilx- – 2011-05-03T15:31:00.960