AHCI - A Few Questions

nheather

nheather

nheather

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I'm building a new machine and I have the option of choosing IDE or AHCI as the SATA access method.

I've read that AHCI can give slightly better performance but I have a couple of questions

(i) I have 4 drives, 3 are SATA but the 4th a DVD drive is IDE. Does this mean I can't use AHCI at all. Or does it mean the SATA drives will use AHCI and the DVD drive will use IDE.

(ii) I'm installing Win 7. Does this have AHCI support built in or do I still need to install the drivers seperately on install.

(iii) I'm probably going to install Windows XP on a secondary boot. I know this needs the AHCI drivers on a floppy. My machine doesn't have a floppy, so can I use a USB floppy or can't I run one of those until I have a full OS.

Many thanks,

Nigel
 
Many thanks for the help.

My MoBo is an AMD (Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P) so I guess I would have to provide the drivers on a disk even for Win 7.

The manual says that you can do this from the MoBo CD for Vista so I guess the same applies for Win 7 - but obviously I'll need to creat a disk with the Win 7 64bit version.

BUT - beginning to sound like too much hassle and risk for a possible small gain. Probably just leave it as IDE.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
All you need to do for Vista/7 is change a registry setting, then change the bios setting to ahci and it should boot fine. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

They have a generic AHCI driver built in, after it's booting in ahci mode you can download and install better, more specific drivers from your manufacturers website with a windows setup just like any other driver.

It's only XP that's tricky.
 
Zarf said:
All you need to do for Vista/7 is change a registry setting, then change the bios setting to ahci and it should boot fine. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

They have a generic AHCI driver built in, after it's booting in ahci mode you can download and install better, more specific drivers from your manufacturers website with a windows setup just like any other driver.

It's only XP that's tricky.
Click to expand...

Hi mate i have read the article from the link but i have already changed mine to ahci and boots no problem..I have checked the registry that the link points you to and the value sat in there is 3 do i still need to change it to 0.
 
Bundies said:
Hi mate i have read the article from the link but i have already changed mine to ahci and boots no problem..I have checked the registry that the link points you to and the value sat in there is 3 do i still need to change it to 0.
Click to expand...

If it boots into windows on ahci mode, id leave the registry setting alone.
 
Windows will boot up a little slower - we're talking a few seconds here though - but you may see a small boost in performance, particularly when benchmarking, as AHCI supposedly works better in multitasking than IDE does. The only way to know for sure is to try it. If you use the registry tweak it's easy to switch back to IDE if you find AHCI problematic.
 
I'm gonna have another look at this tonight but late last night I tried to enable AHCI in the BIOS and it won't boot up (my OCZ 100GB LE SSD).

I changed it to IDE and it wouldn't boot up again, meaning...

It will only boot up as RAID in the BIOS!?

What am I doing wrong?

I am trying to enable AHCI for my OCZ 100GB LE SSD.
 
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