SATA drivers and Vostro 1500

A couple of weekends ago, I reinstalled Vista Home Premium on my Vostro 1500 notebook. I wanted to claim the space consumed by the Dell Restore and Media Direct 3 partitions. I also wanted a clean install.

I ran into some difficulties while installing drivers. According to this page: http://support.dell.com/support/top...62A8739E0401E0A55174744&doclang=en&l=en&s=gen I should install the Intel Matrix storage drivers 4th. However, when I extracted this driver package (that was listed under my service tag), there was no setup program, only raw driver files and a README. I had made an image of my OS partition a couple of weeks ago, so I restored back to it so I could get a screen shot of what Device Manager looked like from the factory install. Most of the differences did pertain to my HDD, (under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, Intel 82801HEM/HBM SATA AHCI Controller in the factory install, vs Intel ICHBM SATA AHCI Controller 2829 in the Vista driver install) so I figured I did need those Intel Drivers.

I got onto Dell Support chat and was told that I did not need those drivers, since I did not have a RAID set up. I still found it odd that there were differences between the factory Device Manager entries and the entries I possessed after a fresh Vista install. He assured me that the Vista drivers would be sufficient. Not content with this, I read the README very carefully and surmised that I would need to install the drivers at the early stages of the Vista install (F6). After doing this, and then completing the Vista and other driver installations, my Device Manager now looks like factory.

Does anyone have any insight? Was this truly unnecessary? Would Vista drivers have sufficed?

Are there any utilities I can run that will make sure that everything is seeing the HDD as SATA 150? (PC Wizard 2008 just states ATA).

Here are some speeds that I am getting on the PC Wizard benchmark:


Sequential Write 29.78 MB/s
Sequential Read 51.43 MB/s
Buffered Write 78 MB/s
Buffered Read 102.54 MB/s
Random Read 27 MB/s


Do these seem on target for SATA 150?



PK