Serial ATA question

If I install the NVIDIA IDE drivers, the Serial ATA disk in my machine appears to the system as an external hard disk - it appears in the Safely Remove Hardware list (though it can't be stopped because its the boot drive). This has the knock on effect of all the partitions on it, along with the My Documents and Shared Documents folder all appearing in the Send To menu, which I use quite a bit. My Documents actually appears twice due to it already being in the Send To folder. I don't like the extra clutter so just want to use a driver which detects the drive as fixed. So here's my question...

If I use the standard IDE driver included with Windows will that limit the speed of my drive to ATA/100 or whatever? I know it will disable NCQ but I don't think its worth having anyway. Up to now when building other Serial ATA based PCs I've been using AHCI where available, I'd just like some clarity on the transfer speed side of things.

I'd still be curious to know the answer to the question above but I fixed my initial problem so it's no big deal anymore, really should have searched a bit more specifically. :rolleyes:

I'll post it here in case anyone has this problem in future. Add the following registry key. Depending on your driver version you may need to replace nvata with nvatabus in the key below. Happy days again.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvata]
"DisableRemovable"=dword:00000001

astrofool

handy tweak would be nice if it could be set per drive though (for the case where an e-sata drive is attached).

8T8

The reason the remove hardware feature appears is because the NVIDIA driver enables warm swapping of the hard drives (a feature of SATA).

As for installing the driver yes it enables NCQ but most NCQ implementations hurt performance more than it helps there might be a few other optimizations in there.

But in general I would not install NVIDIA's storage driver it is known to be a finicky piece of software that can cause all sorts of problems and performance with the normal MS IDE driver is largely the same.

8T8

8T8 wrote:

But in general I would not install NVIDIA's storage driver it is known to be a finicky piece of software that can cause all sorts of problems and performance with the normal MS IDE driver is largely the same.

Except when it knocks the drives back to PIO mode which I'd rather avoid at all costs (maybe I answered my own question in that sense, lol). Trying to do any sort of disk maintenance in Safe Mode can be a pain as a result. I did have a problem with DAE with the NVIDIA driver but sorted it out.

8T8

The most times I've seen anything knocked back into PIO mode on an nForce chipset was when using the NVIDIA IDE PATA driver in general that one should almost never be installed the SATA is okay sometimes but the PATA is usually worse and causes all sorts of compatibility problems with optical drives.

{If you ever have a problem with the stock IDE driver and Ultra DMA mode not kicking in then simply remove the IDE driver from the device manager and reboot 9 times out of 10 when Windows re-installs the driver UDMA will kick in.}