
No. All that I've seen have also an on-board BIOS which enables you to
use up to 2 hard drives directly under DOS (2 drives is a DOS
limitation and you have the same problem with IDE and all other
standards for that matter). Software drivers often allow for better
performance, though. You have to use them if you want to use other
devices besides hard disks or have more than 2 disks.


Obviously these are not able to use the 16-bit real mode BIOSes that
are written for DOS, so you need software drivers. That's not a big
deal (as long as the drivers are available), because you won't have to
fight with any low memory problems either.