New Fixed SATA Hard Disk on Win XP Pro SP2 shows as a removable drive

Hello All, I have just added a new Internal SATA Hard Drive to my existing Windows XP Pro system. Windows recognized it, and it appears in Device Manager under the Disk Drives section. In the drive properties, Policies tab, the "enable write caching" option is absent, which I am told is normal for
SATA Drives, this option normally being set in the SATA Contraller properties. The remaining 2 options "Optimize for quick removal" and "optimize for performance" should be greyed out for a fixed (internal) drive but in my case they are not. Also, the drive appears in the "Safely Remove Hardware" list with my USB devices - and can be removed there!

The drive is a Hitachi 7K160 80 GB SATA2 (HDS721680PLA380). I have the SATA Driver for the motherboard installed OK. It has not yet been partitioned or formatted. Running Windows XP SP2 (Pro) with all current updates. Other 2 Hard Disks are IDE drives, this is the first SATA drive I have used.

I tried uninstalling the drive in Device Manager and rebooting to allow Windows to re-detect it and it ends up the same. Also no change when using the second SATA port.

I ran Computer Management - Disk Management and "initialized the drive" with the new disk wizard but did not "convert" it (to dynamic drive). There it shows under Disk Management and is not shown under Removable Storage. Having never used a removable Hard Disk before I don't know if that would be
the case for a "real" removable hard disk anyway. This has not changed the problem.

Hitachi offer only the most basic of troubleshooting info on their support site.

Does anyone have any ideas about how I can make Windows see the drive as a fixed disk rather than a removable one?

Tony J

 

Thanks for your replies Steve and Pete. I need to keep the "safely remove hardware" icon visible since I use many removable USB devices. It is a pity there is no way to hide the drive from there since it could be removed accidentaly and after cloning the system partition is now on this disk!

I updated my SATA drivers but nothing has changed. I will also take a look at the ASUS website to see if they mention this in the support pages for my motherboard, but I guess there is no "solution ".

Incidentally, although my drive is correctly detected as an SATA 2 drive with max speed 300 MB/s with the disk empty it tested at around 185 MB/s burst and 76 MB/s sustained (using the speed test option in the SATA controller properties). After adding the system partition to the disk this falls to around 140 MB/s burst while the sustained speed is unchanged. In both cases read and write caching are enabled, also command queuing with the updated SATA driver. Are these typical figues? It makes me wonder if the drive is really faster than my old Maxtor ATA150 drive, although I don't have a utility to test that.

Thanks again
Tony

 

Thanks again for the useful info Pete. I found a simple disk speed testing utility here: http://www.roadkil.net/program.php?ProgramID=13 I'm not sure how accurate it is but it's useful for comparisons. Some test results for those that are interested:

Drive Hitachi SATA 2
Access Time 9.70 mS 9.57 9.71
Cached Speed 250.67 MB/s 244.39 254.70
Max Read Speed 75.06 MB/s 75.10 75.04
Score 1226.7 1237.1 1222.2

Drive Maxtor ATA 133
Access Time 10.55 mS 10.11
Cached Speed 190.53 MB/s 190.45
Max Read Speed 63.29 MB/s 63.82
Score 853.0 889.4

Drive Western Digital ATA100
Access Time 12.90 mS 13.07
Cached Speed 144.63 MB/s 144.64
Max Read Speed 52.87MB/s 52.68
Score 516.6 526.3