Vista - Hard Drive settings in BIOS

I now am ready to load Vista Home Premium x64 on a new SATA HD. I will not be setting up any RAID or anything. What settings should I make sure are there in the BIOS or need to be changed? My board is a Intel DP35DP. Does anyone here have this board or could help a first time builder
Thanks!
Barnabas

Hi Barbabas,

You will be fine using defaults but if you have problems you know where to find us

Steven

If you want the advantages of NCQ (most users don't need it) then you'll need to ensure the SATA mode is RAID or AHCI. You shouldn't need any special drivers if you connect the SATA HDD to one of the Intel controller ports (rather than a 3rd-party/manufacturer SATA controller). Vista has built-in drivers for most of the ICH SATA controllers.

If you don't need NCQ, I'd stay with defaults and install in IDE mode. It's less messing around if anything goes wrong.

He said he is not using RAID....

Some BIOSes don't have an explicit AHCI setting, and setting to 'RAID' is the only way to run the SATA ports in native mode.

Didn't know that - but now that I think about it, you're right - my folks bought a Dell machine and got Vista as an update, and it would never install - even the Dell techs couldn't figure it out - but I went and enabled RAID even though they only have a single drive and it installed just fine.

However, I would guess that the Intel board would not have such a restrictive BIOS as OEM computers do....still, my apologies for not thinking that one all the way through....

Thanks all for the reply

My BIOS has these settings ATA/IDE Configuration : Disable, Legacy, Enhanced (or Native). I have it set to Enhanced (or Native). Also there is a Configure SATA as... and the choice are IDE, RAID, or AHCI. This is where I stopped and thought, "ah, IDE or AHCI?" My HD is a Seagate 250GB SATA 3.0gb interface. IDE is the default so I guess it could be set to that or to the Advanced Host Controller Interface. I just don't know which one. Can you set it to one and go back to change it later if there is a conflict with the installation? When I get it set, I'll post back and let you know so anyone who has this MB will have a reference.

Barnabas
>aka Dave<

IDE is better for games and you can switch to AHCI later but you cant switch from AHCI back to IDE, once you switch there is no going back.

Steven

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) should not be used on desktop system. If enabled, you are likely to see a decrease in performance. The only situation where NCQ will help is on a server with a lot of disk access from multiple processes.

S-

Spot on. Most people will see no benefit from NCQ, and as you say, it may slow the machine down slightly. That said, in my experience the performance hit is rarely noticeable without benchmarking.