SATA NCQ with Intel P956??

[Alphafox78]

I loaded the Intel INF drivers for this mobo, but it shows up in device manager that the drive is IDE. when I go under primary channel it says mode5 for the interface. this is using a segage 7200.10 320GB drive with the SATA2.0 jumper removed, so that sata 2 is enabled. it seems like the bios is doing some kind of emulation to make it seem like its a IDE drive when its a SATA drive. with the nforce drivers its easy (Ive used them before on AMD builds), it tells you under the drive, but with this chipset it doesnt seem to do that. any way to make the OS see the drive as a native SATA drive so that I can turn on NCQ?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Read your manual (although even then it's not entirely clear because they call it Native IDE mode, not SATA mode). In the Integrated Peripherals screen of BIOS setup, the option for SATA Port0-3 Native Mode should be set to Enabled. It defaults to Disabled, which runs it in legacy IDE mode so it emulates a standard IDE port instead of native SATA.

Off-topic but damn Gigabyte is prolific with the S775 mainboards. They have 109 models listed!

 

[Alphafox78]

ok, I changed the setting from disabled to enabled... nothing appears different. do I have to load some kind of driver, or is there some other way to check to see if its working aside from the device manager?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Hmm. Are there Intel Application Accelerator drivers available for this chipset? If so, you almost certainly need to load those, as I believe those are the actual IDE drivers from Intel. The INF Update doesn't actually load any Intel IDE drivers, it leaves the Microsoft default drivers in place.

 

[dandragonrage]

Chances are things will be faster with it off.

 

[Alphafox78]

the only thing thats available from the intel site is "Intel® Matrix Storage Manager" and when I go to load it it says that my computer does not meet the minimum requirements.. any ideas?

 

[Madellga]

Same issue here and clueless for the moment. Does anyone knows how to fix this?

 

[Alphafox78]

anyone have any thoughts?

 

[Vette73]

The DS3 or any 965 board that uses the ICH8 south bridge does not support NCQ. It does support Sata2.0 mode but no NCQ. That and NCQ adds nothing and in some cases can hurt desktop performance.
The optional add on SATA port, from jmicron?, I think does support NCQ.

 

[Madellga]

The manual on the Gigabyte says that NCQ requires the AHCI option to be enabled on bios.

This smells like a new Windows XP installation will be required. I'm not willing to reinstall everything for that.

I miss the Nvidia Nforce4 features.

Another thing, the USB ports on the back are reported as STANDARD 1.1 ports. Only the ones inside the computer are USB 2.0 (Enhanced USB).

Isn't that weird? I thought all ports were supposed to be 2.0.

 

[Alphafox78]

Just try plugging the HD into it and turning AHCI on and see what happens. worst case it wont boot, then you can just hook it back into port 0

 

[imported_2x]

If the board uses ICH8, then the SATA is actually SATA emulation mode i.e IDE. If you want true SATA II with NCQ on a board with ICH8, you will need to get an add in SATA II card like the Rosewill RC-207. Otherwise, AHCI is not supported by ICH8 and thus you are not really running true SATA.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The board does already have an add-in Gigabyte controller. It does support NCQ, it's strange that Intel doesn't this late in the game. The manual specifies that the AHCI mode is for the Gigabyte ports.

A reinstall should not be required to use these ports. Make sure they're enabled and in AHCI mode, and install the drivers when Windows detects the controller. When you swap the drive and boot, Windows should work fine. You must have the drivers already installed in order for it to boot on the add-in controller though, in all likelihood.

I like how the manual tells you about enabling AHCI on the Gigabyte controller, then says "for more information on AHCI, visit Intel's website".

 

[Madellga]

I can confirm that this works.

You have to switch the hard disks to the Purple SATA ports and set the SATA RAID/AHCI to AHCI.
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/6092/img1863eu5.jpg

Next time Windows loads, you have the chance to install the IATA software (Intel Matrix Storage Manager).

Reboot, let it finish, turn off, plug the hard disks back to the orange port and it is done.
http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/5428/dq6sataideintelich8ahcifx6.jpg

Very interesting is the fact that using the orange plugs as SATA IDE standard mode, the hard drives are set to ULTRA DMA MODE 5. This slows the system considerably.
http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/5647/dq6sataideintelich8nl4.jpg

Using the purple plugs as SATA IDE standard mode, the hard drives are set to ULTRA DMA MODE 6. System speed is better.
http://img352.imageshack.us/img352/2018/dq6sataidegigabytefq5.jpg

I had the impression after all of this that the purple SATA plugs provide better performance. Can someone confirm that also?

 

[Madellga]

BTW, OP please correct the thread tittle to Intel P965.....

 

[JayhaVVKU]

Anyone know how I can install IATA on a Vista system?

 

[skinnyj]

so if i read this right, you can have a sata drive working put its actually working at ide speeds or what not?

 

[Eddie33081]

Im having the same problem.

I installed it as an emulated IDE drive. I want to change it to SATA. From the instructions above, why do you change it back to the orange plug. I thought the purple gigabyte plugs are faster.

 

[Madellga]

The orange connectors are the native ones. If you plug everything on the purple, you are going to run hard drives as master/slave on channel 1 and the optical drives as master/slave on channel 2. If you copy something from hard drive master to slave on the same channel, you get lower performance.

This is why in principle I'm leaving my 2 HD as masters in different channels using the orange connectors.

 

[Hikari]

In order to get it working properly (I have ICH8R on my AB9 Pro), I had to move the SATA cable to the JMicron port. Then I rebooted, set the Intel one to be AHCI, booted into Windows and installed the Intel Storage Matrix drivers, rebooted again, and moved the cable back to the Intel Port. Now it shows up normally and the "IDE Channels" have disappeared from device manager since it is a normal SATA device.