Tuesday, August 30th 2011
Gigabyte Releases SATA Mode Switching Tool
Gigabyte released a new utility that allows you to change the mode of the chipset SATA controller between IDE, AHCI, and RAID (if available), from within Windows. While the switching isn't exactly on-the-fly (because changing SATA mode is effectively changing the SATA controller as Windows sees it, and hence can't happen on-the-fly), it certainly saves the trouble of going into BIOS setup and digging out that option. The utility works by writing the value of the selected mode to the CMOS, and prompting a system reboot for the change to take effect. Gigabyte's Disk Mode Switch utility works on Gigabyte motherboards based on Intel 6-series chipset (H61, H67, P67, and Z68). Now why you'd need a Windows-based utility to change a BIOS setting as infrequently changed as SATA controller mode is something we'll leave it to you to comment on.
DOWNLOAD: Gigabyte Disk Mode Switch
15 Comments on Gigabyte Releases SATA Mode Switching Tool
I would advise anyone planning to do this to google "ACHI registry hack" before they try it!
They better had written a tool that makes it possible to read temperature sensors from Ramsticks of all manufacturers, no matter if they were used an AMD or Intel board... would have helped me more with my Axeram!:laugh:
What did the bios ever do to manufacturers?
Did it say nasty things about them? Things they could only rectify by employing a team of people to develop a kernel level application that will take longer to install and run and potentially break windows? Maybe its just me but i feel alot more comfortable changing hardware settings in the bios than installing one hundred registry bloating system breaking overclocking and tweaking utilities that i will only use once and potentially compromise my operating systems security, stability and integrity.
I'm betting a lot of inexperienced users are building a Gigabyte machine on defaults with their SSD, installing windows, then learning after all that trouble they should be in AHCI mode .
When they find out the Asus board is set to AHCI by default, Gigabyte might be getting some negative feedback from users......hence the tool.
Gigabyte have made a few bad decisions with the latest boards..
I just installed a SSD onto a Gigabyte Z68MA-D2H-B3, BIOS immediately detected the SSD and SATA drives, it poped up a question asking if I wanted the settings changed.