AHCI or RAID-XHD

moorlander · 28 Aug 2015 at 22:25

I have a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 motherboard with i7-2600K which I have been running with a mechanical HDD and smallish SSD which I use as a cache drive in rst. When setting things up originally I set the bios to RAID-XHD as recommended and things have worked ok.

I have however recently purchased a Samsung 850 EVO which I intend to clean install W10 to rather than clone and upgrade from W7.

I do not foresee ever setting up a raid array and with the ssd I certainly won't need a cache drive.

My question is should I set the SSD up as AHCI rather than XHD (which from what I can see includes AHCI) or are there any benefits to continuing the use of XHD even though it is in a single drive system.

Thanks

mushtafa · 28 Aug 2015 at 23:24

I would use AHCI personally. I have XHD settings switched off on my setup.

Might be worth waiting for someone more knowledgable to answer before using my suggestion though

wazza300 · 28 Aug 2015 at 23:45

Yes that's right,ahci

Raid is used for caching,now your not caching just ahci is enough

traveyb · 29 Aug 2015 at 11:06

AHCI all the way! Is XHD a method of using an SSD with a spinning drive for cacheing?

Rab · 29 Aug 2015 at 19:16

which I intend to clean install W10 to rather than clone and upgrade from W7.

if you don't do upgrade at least once from win 7 to win 10, Win 10 will not activate.
after u do this once, u can do as many clean installs of win 10 as you want, till you change your motherboard

moorlander · 31 Aug 2015 at 17:56

moorlander

Thanks for your responses.

Went with AHCI as recommended and everything went smoothly (well so far anyway).
Quite liking W10 its a bit like W7 on steroids.

In order to keep my options open i.e. if I didn't like W10, I actually cloned my main hdd to a spare hdd. I then booted from the cloned hdd and upgraded it to W10, thus enabling activation. Once it had activated I installed my SSD and did a clean install of W10, which again activated without issues. The nice part being that rather than having to load all my software and data onto the SSD in one go I could do it in chunks by simply swapping between SSD and my original W7 hdd, i.e. booting into W7 if I need to check a setting etc.

Now I have made the transition from old hdd to SSD I have connected my old drive so I can pull data off it as and when I need to, as well as it providing a decent reserve backup. Plus I still have the old cloned hdd as a snapshot which I can stash in a safe place.

Thanks again for your comments.