DFI LP UT nF4 SLI-D SATA shows as USB

[treebeard]

I just got my DFI LP UT nF4 SLI-D all setup according to the recommendations over at dfi-street. I plugged in all 4 power connectors, put one stick of ram in the furthest slot from the cpu, and then put my vid card in and my Maxtor SATA drive that worked fine in My Neo4. So....the bios sees my hard drive as a SATA drive and when I got to install windows I don't hit F6 because I am not going to use raid, and then Windows installs fine. I installed the 6.70 drivers from Nvidia's website and when I install the SW IDE drivers I get two pop-ups about the drivers not being digitally certified or whatever. Okay......so I reboot my system and under device manager I now see PATA drivers (I have one DVD burner via IDE) and then 2 sets of SATA drivers/channels?!?!? And......the funny thing is that my Maxtor SATA drive is now all of a sudden showing up in the sys tray as a removable drive?!!!? What the heck is going on?! I am reinstalling windows to see if that resolves the issue. Anyone seen this weirdness before???

[Radiohead57]

Perfectly normal, to the best of my knowledge. Mine does the same thing. All is well. No need to reinstall windows.

[treebeard]

That's so whacked!!! I was starting to think that maybe I got a hosed board and was going to have to rma it back to NE.

[Radiohead57]

I don't think that this is limited strictly to DFIs either. It may be rooted in the NF4 chipset itself but it took me a day or two to get over the shock as well until I was enlightened.

[treebeard]

It must be an intermittent problem because I installed the 6.70 SW IDE drivers on my Neo4-F and my Maxtor did not show up as a removable drive. As long as I am not alone I am not worried about it then.

[olmari]

Well, I am pretty much confident that it is as it really should be as Serial-ATA was originally designed to be removable on-the-fly, other way said, hot swappable.

So that in mind it sounds just as it should be when hot swapping works as it needs to be, and Windows regonizes this too ofcourse when drive comes to "removable devices" section.

[Radiohead57]

That was the impression I was under as well olmari. It should be listed as hot swappable.

[treebeard]

If that is the case, my Neo4 was not displaying it correctly in the systray. Interesting, but very strange. As with the case with most Nforce things!! I finally got my rig up and running stable for now. I really like my OCZ ram more than the GEIL value ram I had before. I have my 3200+ Winnie running at 2.3, but I plan on trying to get my fsb up to 270 if possible. That would be sweet.

[olmari]

If that is the case, my Neo4 was not displaying it correctly in the systray. Interesting, but very strange. As with the case with most Nforce things!!

Well... It is first of all an optional feature to have Serial-ATA hot-swappable, so most motherboar vendors doesn't usually implement it, because it costs little bit more. I don't know is it supposed to be in every nForce4 or is it just up to mobo manufacturer to implement it, but as we see, positively suprised, DFI atleast has this feature.