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I am curious because I hear about a lot of people saying they had to install drivers on a certain disk to get their Hard drive to work right when installing XP on them. Well I didn't. So I want to check to make sure I am getting the best speed on my hard drive. I read about this is this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata under Advanced Host Controller Interface. Thanks!

As far as people saying they had to install drivers on a certain disk to get their Hard drive to work right when installing XP they are more than likely talking about if they setup a RAID on their machine (requiring 2-5 hard drives depending on the RAID you pick). And they were loading the drivers for their RAID controller on their motherboard since there are so many different controllers for RAID you have to tell Windows which one you are using by providing your driver.

A RAID is (redundant array of independent disks; originally redundant array of inexpensive disks) is a way of storing the same data in different places (thus, redundantly) on multiple hard disks. By placing data on multiple disks, I/O (input/output) operations can overlap in a balanced way, improving performance. Since multiple disks increases the mean time between failures (MTBF), storing data redundantly also increases fault tolerance.

If your SATA drive is not in a RAID it will emulate IDE mode as default (the way it is suppose to be if not doing a RAID.) No need to worry about speed because it will still run at SATA II speeds it's just emulating the platform of IDE not the speed.

You do need drivers to run in RAID like other guy said, but in XP you also need drivers to use ACHI. ACHI adds a few features, makes it run a little faster, though certainly not required. Since you didn't install drivers, you probably are in IDE emulation mode. You will need to go into your BIOS to confirm that. You can change the setting to ACHI there, but DON'T do that now since you already have Windows installed on the disk, that will cause problems.