Problem with my Asus Blitz?

[Steedie]

Hey guys

I've just noticed this after seeing a similar thread where someone mentioned that their motherboard isnt running their HDD's as SATA drives, instead as IDE

Checked mine just incase and it appears its the same. When it boots up it says "Detecting SATA Drives"

With each drive it then says IDE instead. If I go into the BIOS and look at each of my three hard drive, they are running in UDMA-5 mode, which is IDE. My Optical drive is running as UDMA-2, again it should be SATA

They are all seagate 7200.10 hard drives, and the optical drive is a Samsung SATA drive

This motherboard cost me 160 quid, I'd like to think it's running everything properly

Any ideas if this is even a problem and I'm just reading into it wrong?

Cheers guys

P.S - Flashed to the latest BIOS and still the same

 

[Phemo]

Not got a Blitz Formula myself but I do have a P5E which has the X38 chipset so should be fairly similar. To enable 'real' SATA operation you have to have AHCI enabled in the BIOS otherwise the SATA controller works as IDE emulation.

Be warned though that during XP install you'll need to have a floppy drive hooked up with a disk containing the AHCI drivers. Vista has some AHCI drivers already but they run ridiculously slow for me so I have to make sure I load the latest driver off a USB stick during setup.

If you already have XP/Vista installed you should install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager beforehand - I believe this will get the AHCI driver ready (can't fully remember, it's been a while) but there are articles that suggest otherwise. If so then check this out:

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=444831

Vista will boot up ok with its default AHCI driver but I strongly recommend the Intel Matrix Storage Manager is installed straight away because as I already mentioned, it seems to run like a dog without it - even though Vista's driver is supposedly a newer version than Intel's latest.