The ICH5-R serial ATA controller offers two independent serial ATA ports with a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 150 megabytes per second (MBps) per port. One device can be installed on each port for a maximum of two serial devices. A point-to-point interface is used for host-to-device connections, unlike parallel IDE, which supports a master/slave configuration and two devices per channel.

For compatibility, the underlying serial ATA functionality is transparent to the operating system. The serial ATA can operate in both legacy and native modes. In legacy mode, standard IDE I/O and IRQ resources are assigned (IRQ 14 and 15). In native mode, standard PCI resource steering is used. Native mode is the preferred mode for configurations using Microsoft® Windows® XP and Windows 2000 operating systems.