Asus M4A87TD/USB3 - Manual (Page 53)

Chapter 2: BIOS setup 2-13
SATA Port1–Port4 [IDE]
Allows you to set the SATA configuration.
[IDE] Set to [IDE] when you want to use the Serial ATA hard disk drives as
Parallel ATA physical storage devices.
[RAID] Set to [RAID] when you want to create a RAID configuration from the SATA
hard disk drives.
[AHCI] Set to [AHCI] when you want the SATA hard disk drives to use the AHCI
(Advanced Host Controller Interface). The AHCI allows the onboard storage
driver to enable advanced Serial ATA features that increases storage
performance on random workloads by allowing the drive to internally
optimize the order of commands.
SATA Port5 - Port6 [IDE]
Setting this item to [IDE] instead of [RAID] or [AHCI] allows the system to recognize the
optical drives connected to the SATA connectors 5 or 6 when installing OS.
• When the SATA Port1–Port 4 and the SATA Port5–Port 6 items are set to [AHCI], the
information of the SATA connectors 1–6 can be seen only under the OS environment or
during POST.
• For Windows ® XP OS, you have to install the AHCI driver, so that you could use the
SATA connectors 1–6 in AHCI mode under the OS environment.
• If you use a SATA optical drive to run the OS installation disk, we strongly recommend
that you install the optical drive to the SATA connectors 5/6 and set them to [IDE] mode.
• The default setting and the configuration options of the SATA Port5-Port6 item vary with
the selected setting of the SATA Port1-Port4 item.
2.4.3 System Information
This menu gives you an overview of the general system specifications. The BIOS automatically
detects the BIOS information, CPU specification, and system memory in this menu.