Hi just done a fresh install on a new machine I've built. My first system with sata drives, installation went fine and everything's working as it should. Then I realized I never installed any sata drivers, now does this mean that they weren't needed and the drives (seagate barracudas) are operating @300gb/s or are they running in some kind of compatibilty mode?

Sorry if this is a bit noob, how can I test the data throughput?

Thanks

300gb/s wow, thats fast. =) I think you mean 3.0

Anyway, you need to check for a jumper on the hard drive. A lot of those come set to 1.5GB/s by default and you have to remove the jumper to set it to 3.0GB/s. As long as your motherboard supports 3.0GB/s SATA (a.k.a. Sata2) you shouldn't have to do anything else.

what happend is that you installed windows (presuming xp) in ide mode. in bios you get to choose what mode the hard drive is in, sata/ide/raid. once you change it to sata mode, you will have to reinstall windows. this is easy with vista, since sata drivers are built it. but with xp you have 3 options, 1 is to leave it in ide mode. 2 is to install it with a floppy and sata drives when you are prompted. 3 is to create your own installation disk with sata drivers slipstreamed into the disk.

i used to run my comp in ide mode. but recenetly have switched to sata mode. honestly i don't see any difference in speed in my seagate drives, 500gb 7200.11 and 750gb 7200.11.

i havent' done actual performance tests in ide, but i've done them in sata. my results are same as the tomshardware charts for my hard drive.

the software i used was hd tach version 3.0.4.0. you can download it for free here:
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php

and also CrystalDiskMark21 you can get it for free here:
http://www.findfiles.com/search.sr [...] ction=Find

Lmao! 300gb/s dunno what I was thinking there!

I took the jumpers off (both drives) and i suspect I have installed in IDE mode. It's a major pain as it's a pc for the creation of music (lots of streaming samples off disk) so throughput is a big concern especially as I haven't raid0'ed this time.

After some searching I found this...
"I googled a LOT to find a solution which would not require reinstallation of XP
(after I had installed XP in 'IDE' mode). Then, I think it was Lenovo's site, I
bumped into a very useful reminder about how MSwin works. I finally
chose 'Update Driver' for the 82801GBM (in Device Manager) and then chose
'Have Disk' and pointed to it where Intel's drivers (v7.something) were...

After that this laptop booted XP nicely even after I enabled AHCI in bios.

Afterwards, I was able to install Intel's latest (InetlAHCI_v7.8.0.1012, ie.
iata78_enu.exe), which refused to install when the laptop bios was setup
to use disks in IDE-mode (it just said something about there not being any
SATA/AHCI disks), which was the only mode for booting up this XP..."

Don't know how applicable this is but I'm gonna sort the bios out and try it. If not I'm going to have to use nLite aren't I?

It's a real shame because it took ages to install all the software!

Thanks for the replies

yes nlite is the best and easiest way to slipstream files into xp.