Check HDD connection mode (SATA or ATA)

Question

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 as

  Hitachi 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?

Answer

Here are two ways you can determine if it’s in AHCI (native) mode.

1. Open up the Device Manager, click the View menu and select “Devices by connection”. Navigate through the device tree, usually the AHCI controller is attached directly to the PCI bus. The controller device should have AHCI in the name and your drive should be attached to it.

2. Download AS SSD Benchmark, it is small and you don’t need to install anything. Intended to benchmark SSD drives, it will also tell you the controller the drive is connected to if you hover over the third line of the device detail (msahci in the pic below).

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