I bought a pack of ten 128 GB Patriot P210 SSD's to make backups of some old PC's (using Norton Ghost 2003) and I can't get Ghost to see these drives nor can I get a Win-XP system to see them. The common denominator here is that the motherboard bios setting for the SATA interface is set to IDE (not AHCI). Every other SATA hard drive I have, and I have probably a hundred drives of all sizes, and a few SSD's, Ghost can see them all.

I attached one of these Patriot drives to a win-10 system, and yes it can see the drive, initilize and partition it, etc.

The fine print on these drives says O/S Supported: Windows® 7*/8.0*/8.1/10. The * means "driver might be required".

I've come across some comments on reddit saying there might be something different about these drives - making them non-functional under IDE settings.

Can anyone here confirm this? If it's true, why would Patriot do this? Is there any upside internally for an SSD to drop IDE-compatibility mode?

Ok I have an update.

Summary: On 2 different systems, the Patriot P210 128 gb SSD is not visible / accessible to the running OS if the SATA port is set to IDE mode.

Details - system 1:

I have Win-7 Pro SP1 installed on a WD800JB 80-gb IDE hard drive on an IBM Thinkcenter PC (this box would date to around 2004/2005 but Win-7 was installed probably 2015). The motherboard has an IDE connector and a couple of SATA connectors. The motherboard naturally is not UEFI.

In the BIOS setup of this PC is this:

Devices
IDE Drives Setup
- Parallel ATA: Primary or Disabled
- Serial ATA: Enable or Disable
- Native mode operation: Automatic or Serial ATA

Printed on-screen for that last option is this help description:

"Choose which channels will be placed in Native mode. In Automatic mode, only the serial channel is placed in Native mode, and only if necessary. Note: Some OS do not support native mode."

With the "native mode operation" set to Automatic, the Patriot SSD is not detected by Win-7. I wait for 10 minutes and Win-7 has not detected the drive. I go into Device manager and Disk manager, the drive is not there.

I reboot, go into the bios, and change "native mode operation" to Serial ATA, reboot the box, and Windows detects new hardware, installs something and then the Patriot SSD is visible, but not initialized. I have to choose MBR or GPT first to be able to do anything in Disk Manager, but I don't do anything at this point because I've established that a bios setting does influence the visibility of this SSD under Win-7 SP1. Again I suspect that this is the fundamental IDE vs AHCI issue. IBM seems to refer to AHCI as "native mode Serial ATA".

Details - system 2:

A socket 775 Intel based motherboard, no IDE interface on the board, it has a floppy drive interface and 6 sata connectors. Windows XP pro SP3 is installed on a 500 gb Seagate sata HDD. In the bios the SATA mode is set to IDE. Attaching the Patriot SSD and powering up, the SSD is not visible to XP. It doesn't show up in Drive management or Device Manager. Disconnecting the XP drive and booting Norton Ghost 2003 from a floppy same thing - no drives detected.

Change the SATA setting in the bios to AHCI, re-attach the XP drive, yes XP boots up - because I had already installed the SATA drivers for XP. But YES - the Patriot SSD is now visible. Reboot with the Ghost floppy - yes, Ghost sees the SSD.

Now - I clone the 500 gb XP HDD to the 128 gb Patriot SSD using Ghost. The XP drive is only using about 8 gb of drive space, so this is possible, destination volume is re-sized. Clone is made, AND it boots. The 128 gb Patriot SSD does boot just fine into XP.

There is something different about these Patriot SSD's that nobody will ever see if they are attached to a sysem with UEFI bios or with SATA ports set to AHCI. These drives can't be used to make clone backups of old / legacy systems or used with IDE-SATA convertor boards on systems that don't have SATA ports.

Why not just change the setting and see if it detects? Takes like 30 seconds.

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I'm watching the same thread in another forum. The OP has managed to get other SSDs to work, but not this one. Something is very odd about it.

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There was a reddit thread in r/windowsxp about 3 months ago where this issue came up with this same Patriot SSD, same observations and same conclusion - that Patriot dropped IDE-mode support.

I wonder if this somehow saved them money (is there a royalty or license fee involved with IDE?) or perhaps this forces AHCI to be turned on (and hence will assure TRIM and NCQ and other AHCI-only features will be present) so it could be a way to reduce end-user support costs.