Support for Serial ATA
Although Sata controllers are common on modern IBM-PC-compatible motherboards, few are directly supported by Windows XP. So, most Sata controllers require the use of a driver floppy to install Windows on an attached disk.The notable exception is Intel’s ICH5. Intel’s ICH5 Southbridge can drive two channels, and the ICH5R variant even offers Raid 0 and 1. The ICH5 is used on most motherboards using the Intel 865 and 875 chipsets, and that does take in a lot of models from many motherboard makers.
Among other companies producing chipsets with integrated Sata, the most prominent are probably VIA and SiS. VIA’s VT8237, VT8239 and VT8251 Southbridges, and the 964 and 965 variants of the SiS MuTIOL Media I/O family, can offer either two or four ports.
Intel’s latest Sata chipset is the ICH6. This supports four Sata ports but the Raid-enabled version adds Matrix Raid, a particularly clever, and currently unique, feature. Matrix Raid is a hybrid of Raid 0 and Raid 1but uses two disks rather than the four typically required by Raid 0+1 or 1+0.
An equal portion of the two disks is striped in parallel for the Raid 0 array, and the remaining portions of each mirrored across the two as Raid 1 for fault tolerance.
(rather than the usual four) to provide Raid 0 for speed AND Raid 1 for security
The ICH6 chipset is most likely to be found in the new breed of Pentium 4 motherboards incorporating the LGA775 processor socket and 915 or 925 Northbridge.
Add-on Sata adapter cards are widely available for use with motherboards lacking integrated Sata chipsets. Adaptec, best known as leading SCSI vendor, has a range on offer, as does Promise, a company that’s had a lot of success with its FastTrak range of Pata adapters. Most of these cards are aimed at Raid rather than single-disk configurations, but many do support booting from a single attached Sata disk.