Enabling SATA under Vista on Samsung R40+

I have Samsung R40+ (on Radeon Xpress 1250) with 120GB Hitachi SATA HDD and Vista Home Basic installed. How to check whether my HDD uses SATA? I don't see any AHCI controllers and drivers in the Device Manager. Moreover, there is no option to turn on AHCI in BIOS at all. And, finally, now HDD works in UDMA-5 mode. How to switch to at least UDMA-6?
Thank you for your help!

 

I haven't come across a notebook which uses UDMA-6.

The easiest way to check whether your HDD is SATA is to look at the model number in Device Manager and then use Google.

John

 

Oh, my HDD definitely supports SATA, but I heard that the AHCI drivers should be installed in order to make all things work. Before installing them I should first enable AHCI in my BIOS, but there is no such option in BIOS.

 

AHCI is needed for the Intel Matrix Storage Driver, which is needed for Intel Turbo Memory. If you don't have Turbo Memory then don't worry about AHCI. Since the R40+ has the ATI chipset then it won't have these Intel features.

SATA is just the newer version of the standard HDD interface which has more grown potential than the old IDE / PATA. However, the performance difference with current notebook HDDs is not significant and SATA actually draws more power when on idle.

John.