Universal ATA driver
for Windows NT3.51/NT4/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7/ReactOS
With PATA/SATA/AHCI support

It worth installing UniATA driver if vendor of your new
motherboard do not want to supply you with drivers for
your old OS. Or vice versa, you have old motherboard and
want to install new Windows with it. Of course, it is
possible to use standard (generic) drivers those most
probably supports this hardware. But what about performance?
You will have PIO mode with 0.5 - 3 Mb/sec transfer rate.
UniATA shall use DMA or UltraDMA and have up to 10 times
better performance. There is still one common problem with
modern hard driver of more than 128 Gb capacity (also known
as LBA-48 or BigLba). Old OSes do not support such drives
at all, new ones require latest Service Packs. UniATA has
built-in support for large drives. And at last - upgrade or
downgrade of the motherboard. If you simply connect your
harddisk to different motherboard, the driver of the previous
one shall not recognize new IDE controller.
And the system shall not boot. You will have to connect
everything back, change IDE drivers to generic ones, reboot
and reconnect hardware again, then change drivers to new
ones. You cannot even think about walking with bootable
harddrive to some other computers. Or resign yourself to
have 0.5 - 3 Mb/sec transfer rate. Since UniATA supports
numerous IDE controllers and in addition is capable of
driving all standard (onboard primary/secondary) controllers,
this problem also appears to be solved. Also, UniATA works
with new SATA and AHCI controllers Below you can find
more detailed and more technical feature list.

Features:

DMA/UDMA support (up to ATA-133) on known and generic
DMA on unknown controllers
LBA48 (large drives above 128Gb) support
large drives above 2Tb support (SCSI READ16, WRITE16)
SerialATA support (SATA, SATA-2, SATA-3)
AHCI rev. 0.95 - 1.30 support
NT3.51 (i386+ CPU), NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, 2005, Vista, 7,
ReactOS (x86/i386)
SMP/HT support
support of contiguous set of modes UDMA0-UDMA6
(ATA-16/25/33/44/66/100/133)
Support of numerous IDE controllers and generic ATA/ATAPI
no reinstall required when migrating to different IDE controller
or motherboard.
internal command queueing and optimized execution order
of read/write requests
user-mode device management utility atactl.exe. You can change
data transfer mode (PIO/DMA/UDMA) on the fly.
tuning Read/Write cache, transfer modes and many other things
via Registry settings
list of bad/unreliable blocks, to prevent driver from treating HDD
but return error immediately (Nikolai Vorontsov).
NEW SCT Command Transport support (used by smartmontools)
Hot swap for IDE devices under OSes prior w2k (Mike)