Hitachi sata/raid drivers

[Guest]

Where can I find drivers for 500GB hard drives hitachi?

 

[sub mesa]

HDDs don't need drivers; the operating system is smart enough to know how to communicate with them.

For AHCI, you need at least Windows Vista / Windows 7 as XP is too old for AHCI.

 

[Paperdoc]

You do not need drivers for specific manufacturer's hard drives. But you MIGHT need drivers for specific drive types, like IDE (PATA), SATA, AHCI or RAID.

IDE (aka PATA) drives already have all the drivers needed built into any Windows OS, so you don't need anything added.

Native SATA or AHCI drive mode drivers are built into Vista and Win 7, so again you need nothing added if you're using one of those. However, Win XP in all its versions did NOT know how to use either of these. IF you are using Win XP and the SATA drive will be a data disk only, you can install the required drivers in XP. BUT IF you want to install XP on that drive and boot from it, you need to decide how to set it up.

The easiest way to boot from a SATA drive into Win XP is to let the BIOS take care of the problem. When you configure the SATA port there often are options of four modes to choose: IDE (aka PATA) Emulation, native SATA, AHCI, or RAID. Unless you actually plan to use RAID, do not choose that. If you choose IDE Emulation, the BIOS will make the real SATA drive appear to Win XP to be a plain old IDE drive and it will all work just fine. However, there are a few features of SATA and / or AHCI you won't be able to use.

If you choose native SATA or AHCI modes in BIOS Setup for a Win XP installation, you need to have the proper drivers for your mobo's SATA chipset (probably on a CD with the mobo, or download from the mobo maker's website) on a FLOPPY disk, and you'll need a floppy drive at least temporarily. Very early in the Win Install routine there is an option screen that asks whether you need to install extra drivers for special hardware, and you press F6 if you do. You get to install them from floppy then, and your Win XP will build in those extra drivers permanently so you can install to and later boot from a native SATA (or AHCI) drive unit. If you're going to do this, your mobo's manual should have complete details how.

If you actually plan to use RAID disk arrays, you WILL need to add in drivers. If the RAID array will be only as data disks, that can be done to a running Win OS after it is installed. But if you plan to BOOT from a RAID array you will need to add the RAID driver(s) into the Windows install, no matter which Windows you are installing.