Probs with SATA HDD/XP Pro

byte

I have an odd problem with my only HDD on a new machine. It's a S-ATA WD hard drive and on it is Win XP Pro. The problem is that Windows sees the HDD as a removable device. I have an icon (image of a drive with green arrow above it) in my system tray which is to allow me to "Safely Remove Hardware"! Normally, i'd only get this icon if I have a camera or something installed. The fact that it considers my main C drive as a removable device is worrying.

I'm not sure if the problem is with the HDD (connected to Sata1 port on K8N Neo mobo), Windows, or with perhaps BIOS settings.

Can anyone please help?

ViperVenoM

i cant help u as such but i know my 300gb sata drive..in plugged into port 4
and i also have the little green arrow asking if i want to uninstall it

doesnt bother me though its not my C drive..its my er..K or J or summat (many partitions :rolleyes: )

so yeh..im in the same position as you..same board too...interesting ...

byte

Hmm, I'm starting to think it may be to do with BIOS settings, though I'm not too clued up in where to look! Out of curiousity, is that SATA drive you have the only SATA, or do you have a few?

Bass.exe

This is the "hot-plug" feature, is it not? It's a feature on modern HDDs so that you can swap them in/out without shutting down the machine. It shouldn't make any difference to the normal operations of your machine... just don't swap out your C: drive

astrofool

i don't think u could even if u attempted it anyway as C would be in use all the time (swap file), + it would redetect it on next boot up anyway.

Mine is the same, I think all sata drives are the same, makes replacing a failed mirrored drive alot easier

byte

Ah well, I'll assume it's normal then and let it be. Could do without the annoying icon though!

netman

Erm, don't know if it's normal, sounds like the hot swap feature and maybe that's something that was brought in on the newer AMD motherboards.

I definitely don't have the little green icon for my SATA drives. Got two of them at home on an Intel machine and they work fine. Also got a SATA drive at work and no little green icon either. Intel machine again.

Have you checked performance on those drives while they're in their "removable" mode ?

You have two options in windows - optimize for performance or optimize for quick removal. And then you have a tick box for enabling write cacheing.

Without that, your disk operations will be very slow which I'd find a bigger problem than a little green icon in the system tray

In the case of my iPod, windows will let me optimise it for performance but won't turn on write cacheing for some reason so I'm only getting about 4 MB/s transfer on it here in work. At home it flies at 15-16 MB/s.

ViperVenoM

hmm i havent tried testing the speed of my drive, i cant run some programs as they only test C..mine is split into 2 partitions G and J so id need a proggy that can test all drives..

however i can say it seems bloody fast installing games/loading them (ive just got a 200gb partition dedicated to running games and they all seem a damn site faster then on the ide..i dunno if thats coz its sata or because its got 16mb cache tho..

and byte yes its the only sata drive ive got...2 ide and 1 sata

Prior Of Taize

i have the same problem with 2 maxtor 200Gb's....

My advice is do like i did and just leave it...if it aint broke dont fix it...

I dont have any problems with my drives and they are "removable" supposedly