SATA Compatibility

Before you go taking apart your Xbox 360, you might as well make sure
you have the right equipment to flash your drive. The Xbox 360 DVD-ROM
drive uses a Serial ATA (SATA) interface, so you will need SATA ports on
your desktop PC’s motherboard. The picture below shows what a SATA
port looks like. Having SATA is not enough though; you must have the
right kind - the chipset that controls the SATA functions must be compatible
with your version Xbox 360 drive.



Samsung MS25
Samsung MS25 drives can be flashed with many SATA chipsets. Silicon
Image, Promise, and NForce2 chipsets are known to NOT be compatible
for flashing Samsung drives. There are possibly more that cannot flash a
Samsung MS25. Intel ICH5/6/7/8 chipsets, NForce 3/4, SiS, Uli, Jmicron,
and VIA chipsets are all known to be compatible – others may also be.
You cannot flash a Samsung drive using a SATA-to-USB adapter. If you
are unsure whether your SATA is compatible or not, the best advice is to
just try it out. If the SATA isn’t compatible, the drive won’t be recognized.
You won’t brick your drive if the SATA is incompatible, it just “won’t work” –
so you’re not losing much by just trying out what you already have. If you
do not have SATA or yours is incompatible, you should look into
purchasing a VIA VT6421 PCI card.

Samsung MS28
Samsung MS28 drives can be flashed using two methods, the VIA bad-
flash recovery method and the VCC method. You are best off purchasing a
VIA brand card to do the bad-flash recovery method.
Even with the VCC method, you would need a chipset
compatible with MS25 drives, since the VCC method is the equivalent of
temporarily “dropping down” to MS25. It is just easier and safer using a
VIA brand SATA chipset. You cannot flash a Samsung drive using a
SATA-to-USB adapter.

Hitachi 46 / 47 / 59
These “older version” Hitachi drives can be flashed with basically all SATA
chipsets. It should work as long as the SATA supports ATAPI devices
(optical drives). Another good thing about these drives is they are the only
Xbox 360 drives that can be flashed with a SATA-to-USB adapter. The
cheap generic one I bought on eBay worked fine.

Hitachi 0078FK
These drives can be flashed by most SATA chipsets. Silicon Image SATA
chipsets will NOT work; they corrupt the data and will give you an error.
Attempting to flash this drive with a SIL chipset could brick your drive.
Also, in rare cases, there are reports that VIA chipsets have problems with
some version 78 drives. Personally, my VIA 8237 is iffy. I have to play
with it for a while until I get it to read the drive. Shorter SATA cables seem
to help with my setup. Many other chipsets should work fine.

VIA SATA
Just some notes about users of VIA SATA chipsets. This is for both
onboard chipsets (like the 8237) as well as the PCI cards (6421).

A common problem is detecting the drive with MTKFlash with VIA chipsets.
For some reason, many people have this problem when using the external
ports on the VIA SATA cards, or the “1” port if using internal. What seems
to work best for most people is always using the primary “0” SATA port. On
the PCI SATA cards, this is almost always an internal port. If there are
multiple internal ports, use the port closest to the front of your PC.