DaniS506 (Daniela’s S506 ADD) is an EIDE driver with support for Intel, VIA, ALi, SiS, CMD, Promise, Cyrix, HighPoint, AMD, Artop, SMSC, ServerWorks, Opti, Nvidia, National Semiconductor, SiliconImage, ITE, Adaptec, ATI, Broadcom, JMicron, Marvell chipsets, and generic busmaster support for all SFF-8038i compliant chips.
This covers virtually *any* EIDE controller built/sold in the past decade or two. Don’t be confused by the generic chip names below! If you are uncertain about the actual controller to be supported, run the DumpIDE utility – it will tell you.
See ChipList.txt for a full list of supported chipsets.
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Users
Please read the ReadMe before installing and using this software.
These official binary releases are thoroughly tested on many different systems and various size disks up to and including 2TB disks. Disks larger than 2TB are not supported.
Usage Notes
General
On bare metal (non-virtualized environments), where it is possible to switch the AHCI controller to “legacy” or IDE mode, and where the controller is recognized by DaniS506, generally DaniS506 will provide better performance than the OS2AHCI driver.
It is generally not possible to switch between AHCI and “legacy” or IDE mode without backing up the data on the attached device(s), repartitioning, and reformatting the volume(s) on the drive(s). This is entirely dependent upon the hardware being used. Care should also be taken in multi-boot environments where more than one operating system may be present on the same drive, and how such a hardware change may impact those other systems.
Solid State Drives (SSDs)
DaniS506 can effectively operate SSDs of varying types, including those connected to via Parallel ATA (PATA) interfaces (generally through the use of an adapter card and mount). For older laptops, where no AHCI hardware is available, the installation of an SSD to replace an aging mechanical drive can provide an enormous performance benefit as well as offering much larger capacity than available PATA mechanical drives.
Virtualized Environments
When given the choice of vitualized IDE or SATA hardware, typically, SATA (utilizing AHCI, and not DaniS506) will provide better performance. However, if DaniS506 is used, note the following:
- Some hypervisors create a single IDE controller and automatically configure the virtual DVD/CD on the 2nd (slave) port. This should be avoided.
- Better performance and stability are obtained by using two separate IDE controllers. (The DVD/CD may be master or slave on the secondary controller.)
- DaniS506 lacks code to suspend properly when there is concurrent disk and ATAPI device I/O, and this may lead to instability and overall poor performance.
Support and Submitting Tickets
Please read the PROBLEMS.TXT in the doc\DaniS506 directory before submitting a ticket.
Reporting bugs and requesting new features is done through the ticket system. You can view existing tickets, add comments to them and create new tickets using the corresponding buttons at the top of every page. If you want to submit a new bug or request a feature, please use the Search function first to make sure there is no ticket for the same problem already created.
Please follow these guidelines when using the ticket system:
- Only one problem, one system, and one configuration per ticket.
- Do not change the configuration from what is reported in the ticket. Stick with the configuration you reported until it is resolved. If you have a problem with a different configuration, open a different ticket. This means do not add or remove disk drives from the system, do not change Vendor Supplied Firmware (BIOS/UEFI/ACPI/…) settings, do not change drivers, etc.
- Do not post DFSee outputs or results unless requested by the developer and done exactly as specified by the developer. DFSee results are useless unless done exactly the way the developer specifies.
- Make sure you attach a testlog log file to your ticket when you open it.
Be aware that only official binaries are supported.
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