SATA & AHCI Compatibility

[Scuzzy]

Hi there,

Can any SATA Hard Drive be used in AHCI mode ?

The reason I ask is I have just activated AHCI installed Windows 7, below are my HD's

1) OCZ Agility 120gb - Windows 7 on
2) Samsung F1 - 1TB
3) WD Raptor 74GB
4) Maxtor 250gb Sata 1 drive

Now since I have used my system using AHCI my old Maxtor HD is causing me a headache. This will sometimes go missing in "My computer" and also when I open it up to view the files on radom occasions this will cause windows explorer to hang,

So is this because my old SATA 1 Drive is not AHCI compatible or is it because it maybe on its way out?

Thanks in advance

 

[mrk]

The old drive may not be compatible.

In the BIOS the drives should show up as SCSI devices and also be listed on the AHCI controller init screen (after POST).

You can run the old drive in SATA/IDE emulation mode though, what mobo do you have?

On my Gigabyte EP45-UD3P I have 8 SATA ports, you can enabled AHCI which maps just a handful of those ports to be AHCI Native SATA only whilst the others are standard SATA/IDE emulated which is useful for SATA DVDRW drives and HDDs that don't play nice with AHCI.

 

[Scuzzy]

Many Thanks for the reply;

My Motherboard is Asus Rampage Extreme II,

I have looked through the BIOS and cant find an emulation option.

When I pull the Maxtor out of my machine I dont suffer the Explorer issue of not responding etc etc....

You also mention that it may not be compatible in AHCI mode, is that the case that some older SATA drives cant run this way?

Thanks for the help

 

[mrk]

Well it's probably mainly down to the SATA controller itself, my board uses an ICH10R controller, I'm not familiar with your mobo but it appears to have the same ICH10R chipset so the same BIOS settings for SATA may well exist.

Is there an option to use Native SATA for ports 0-4 for example?

Also if it's only SATA150 (Gen 1 SATA) then I don't know how it will handle AHCI.

 

[AbsenceJam]

The drives don't matter.