Secondly, any possible benefits you may see will be minuscule, however that's not to say you shouldn't use it. If you intend using an SSD at any point in the near future, you may as well have it switched on now. It will also enable native command queueing which is nice, but almost no use to the average desktop user.
Be aware however that if you do run the disk controller in AHCI mode, you want to make sure you have the latest controller drivers direct from the respective manufacturer. With IDE mode you can get away with Windows dealing with the drivers. With AHCI, you want to make sure the drivers have all of the correct optimisations and are as up to date as possible.
Pro:
NCQ (if a server)
Automatic detection of connected drives (though can be finicky)
Hotswapping via safely remove hardware
Needed for TRIM and garbage collection with some SSD's
Cons:
NCQ (if a desktop)
Needs drivers so aside from W7 there are often issues with various other bootCD's and tools
Slower startup
Controllers a few years old often have issues with SATA ODD's
You can have the same hotswapping with hotswap.exe (and it's safer too) so I only suggest it if it's needed for a SSD.
Well I will consider giving AHCI a miss, I would have to modify the registry to do it, so it may be simple without reloading the OS. But my system boots up pretty quickly, and my F3's seem to bench OK for mechanicals, so maybe I won't see any benefit from AHCI.
Just go IDE Achi as pointed out above is pointless if SSD is better on achi then you can just enable achi when you get an ssd as you would need to reinstall windows to it anyway.
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