Your way out of the gloom: Universal driver

Universal driver

That is the same people in the world, which alone his genius sawing protracted, throw again … And continue on their projects, no one knows.Alter , author of the driver UniATA one of them. preparing another topic with news from the life of the team ReactOS, I was surprised to aware of the fact that such a brilliant design as UniATA not only never mentioned in the Habré, but still enjoys an undeserved oblivion on the Internet. UniATA – is universal in all senses of the word driver is ATA-device, developed in 2002. A key feature is that the driver does not require you to re-install your OS when you change IDE controller or motherboard materinskoy. project in dire need of testers!

UniATA currently provides support for:

NT3.51 (including on the i386), NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, 2005, Vista, 7, ReactOS
the entire line mode DMA, UDMA0-UDMA6 (ATA-16/25/33/44/66/100/133) at the base of known controllers and DMA – on compatible
hard disk capacity of more than 128Gb (LBA-48, EnableBigLba)
SerialATA (SATA, SATA-2, SATA-3), AHCI rev. 0.95 – 1.30
large list of IDE controllers, as well as any other ATA / ATAPI-compatible controllers.
hot-swappable IDE drives in OS under w2k
internal command queuing and execution of read / write operations in a more optimal sequence
user-mode utility for managing atactl ATA / ATAPI devices. You can find me the data transfer mode (PIO / DMA / UDMA).
cache configuration, speed, and much more in the Registry
list of bad / unreliable blocks to the disk driver is not tortured, and immediately return an error (Nikolai Vorontsov).

Why and who needs a driver? I told him: UniATA makes sense to put, if the new motherboard drivers are not attached to your old operating systems. Or vice versa – there is an old board to which you want to plant a new windsurfing. Of course, there is a standard built-in drivers that are sure this iron will recognize and work with him. But how … In PIO mode, ie 0.5-3 MB / sec. A UniATA will work in DMA or UltraDMA mode, which significantly (sometimes even 10 times) faster. And here is another problem – the new screws volume greater than 128 GB (LBA-48 or BigLba). In older OSes they support is not provided at all, and the new demand of recent Service Packs. Support for these screws in UniATA built. And finally – the situation is changing the motherboard. Usually this is not a trivial task. If you simply make the change, drivers from the previous board do not recognize the new IDE controller and the system will not boot. We’ll have to return the card back, forcing the driver to change the standard again, change the board and install new ones. About to go with your boot hard drive to your friends to visit (or work), you can forget (or be content with the speed of 0.5-3 MB / sec). Since UniATA supports a long list of controllers and, in addition to the list understands almost any standard (conventional onboard primary / secondary), this problem is also solved. UniATA also understands the new SATA and AHCI controllers. Below you can read a more detailed (and technical) list utility.