I recently did a major upgrade on my old home PC in stages: power supply a couple of months ago, new motherboard/CPU several weeks ago, and a new Caviar Black 500Gb SATA-3 drive yesterday (Fri, 1/21). According to a utility I have, HD Tune, my drive is transferring at the old PATA data rate, around 132 Mbps. This is working okay with the OnChip SATA type in the BIOS set to “Native IDE”. I tried setting the OnChip SATA type to AHCI thinking it would let the drive transfer at the SATA-3 speed, but the machine hangs on boot. System is Win XP Pro.
This is my first experience with newer technology, after using an eight year old mother board and CPU with a PATA drive setup, so I’m not saying I understand it all. Am I missing something, or do I expect something to happen that’s not going to happen? I want to get all the performance from the system that it’s capable of giving.
Thanks for the replies. To make a long, confusing story short, I ended up reinstalling Windows XP.
I downloaded the drivers from Gigabyte to a diskette and loaded them at the first of the install where it asks for any special drivers for RAID. The only thing is, I reloaded Windows on the OLD PATA hard drive and went through the drive cloning again. This time it worked. That’s how I’m running now. It was a lot of work but I was stuck inside with bad weather outdoors so the time was right to get the issue solved.
I got a message from Gigabyte saying the same thing: Win XP won’t take full advantage of the serial interface but Win 7 will. For the time being, the only benefit I’ll get is hot plugging if I want it (I don’t) and the speed will not be much faster than a 133 PATA drive, but it still works well. And if I upgrade, I’ll be ready to go. Until then, XP works so I don’t want to fix it.
