This board is based on G31 + ICH7 chipset. ICH7 doesn't support ACPI so, you don't need specific driver for SATA.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/suppo … chnologies.html

So am I good to install without using a driver or are you saying I can use any other motherboards driver?

Saidian wrote on 2023-04-14, 06:07:

So am I good to install without using a driver or are you saying I can use any other motherboards driver?

If your SATA is in IDE mode then you don't need to use any driver.

If you're using RAID or AHCI then you'll need to install a driver for the chipset you're using (any driver supporting ICH7 will do).

Although there are ICH7 variants that support AHCI/RAID, this motherboard looks extremely truncated (only 2 physical SATA ports).
So I suspect that the basic ICH7 variant (82801GB) was used - which doesn't support AHCI nor RAID.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_c … Series_chipsets

Sounding like I should probably look for another motherboard then? I found the Biostar up for sale for £10 and it included a cpu, cooler and 4gb of DDR2 and I liked the sound of that deal.
But if I'm going to be limited to IDE speeds maybe I should spend a bit more for a board that can properly do SATA. Unless it wouldn't matter either way?

Saidian wrote on 2023-04-14, 07:00:

Sounding like I should probably look for another motherboard then? I found the Biostar up for sale for £10 and it included a cpu, cooler and 4gb of DDR2 and I liked the sound of that deal.
But if I'm going to be limited to IDE speeds maybe I should spend a bit more for a board that can properly do SATA. Unless it wouldn't matter either way?

SATA operates at the speed it's capable of even in IDE mode. In your chipset's case (SATA2), you could reach up to 300MB/s sequential.

I'm wondering what kind of disk you're using. If you're using mechanical hard disks you're unlikely to notice any difference, as standard hard disks usually peak at around 100MB/s sequential. High sequential r/w speeds are only relevant for SSDs.

Fair enough then I'll continue with my current plan 😀
I'm fine with normal HDD speeds so it's all good. Cheers for the assistance!

Sata II speed (300 MiB /s) will be in perfectly fine.
It's ICH7 (which is used in 99% motherboards with Intel 945, G31 even G41 chipsets) just lacks additional features like AHCI / RAID.
Consider better board only if you need those features or more than two SATA devices.