Is it possible under Windows 7 to check whether a particular disk is recognized by Windows as SATA or ATA?
I've installed Windows 7 on an old HP laptop with SATA drive. Laptop's
hdd in Device Manager
appeared as
Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00 ATA
This hdd is the SATA drive and the chipset in the laptop definitely supports SATA. I've turned on 'Write-caching policy' and completely forget about all that staff.
Then, a friend of mine told me, that for specific Intel chipsets it is necessary to install an HP-provided SATA driver, otherwise Windows would not be able to connect the disk in SATA mode.
So I've downloaded the SATA driver for Vista from HP site (Windows 7 for
that laptop officially isn't supported) and manually updated Intel
SATA AHCI Controller in Device Manager
with that driver.
And that's what happened:
After the reboot, Windows displayed a popup window saying it has found a 'new' Hitachi hdd.
In
Device Manager
the hdd appeared asHitachi HTS541612J9SA00
(notice the missing ATA suffix.)
But I'm not able to turn on 'Write-caching policy' now, because Windows says:
Windows could not change the write-caching setting for the device. Your device might not support this feature or changing this setting.
And the main thing: I do not see any difference in the hdd speed (I've checked it with CrystalDiskMark before and after the driver 'update').
In BIOS there is a SATA native mode
setting and it is set to Enable
.
So again, is it possible under Windows 7 to check whether a particular disk is recognized by Windows as SATA or ATA?