Installing Windows 7

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

i know install the SO, but there some options in the Bios that i dont understand

Hard Drive Mode: WD5003ABYX

Options in the Bios:

1-Sata RAID/ACHI Mode [Disabled]

i can change that to:

[Raid] Enable Sata as RAID Function 

[Achi] Enable Sata as ACHI Function

2- Onboard SATA IDE Ctrl Mode [IDE]

i can change that to

[Achi] Sata ports works as ACHI Mode

[Raid] Sata ports works as Raid and IDE as IDE

3- Sata Port0-3 Native Mode [Disabled]

i can chage that to:

[Enabled] Sata Port0-3 works as Native IDE Mode

or there is other option… “… as Legacy IDE Mode”

I dont know what mean, achi, raid, legacy. etc

anyone can help me a little please. this is my first sata hard drive

2

First a correction…. It is not ACHI. It should be AHCI or Advanced Host Controller Interface.

SATA ports can be configured to work as IDE, Raid and AHCI modes.  When you setup your motherboard to work on native IDE mode SATA drive will appear to system + OS as a legacy drive. This will not give you the advantages of SATA drive such as Native Command Queuing (simply put, higher speed) and Hot Swapping.

Please read Wiki here… Reading is more voluble than Gold!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Please note that turning SATA IDE to SATA AHCI mode on Windows pre installed system will create booting issues. You need to modify the Registry parameters to fix this issue. Please post back here if you have this condition. I will direct you for a remedy.

You don’t need to enable RAID functions unless you are planning use more than one physical drive to configure as single drive. Raid will give you added speed and or redundancy on a drive failure. This is entirely dependent on how you setup your Raid set.

If you enable AHCI mode in SATA prior to Windows Vista/7 installation, setup will reorganize setting correctly and install drivers accordingly. In Windows XP, you need to provide AHCI drivers in a floppy during installation.