SATA, going from IDE mode to AHCI Mode???

GAMEfreak

GAMEfreak

GAMEfreak

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Joined
16 Nov 2005
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759
Location
Newry, Northern ireland
Hey there. I have a gigabyte DS4 motherboard, and a 250GB Hitachi Deskstar T7K500. I want to enable NCQ and such, and do as much as poss to improve the performance of my HDD. the final step of this is to get this done. anyway, When I set my BIOS to run the onboard SATA controller in AHCI mode, when i go to boot this RAID/SATA utility appears, and detects my SATA DVD-RW drive, but not my HDD. any ideas why? it seems that there are two controllers on board, one controlled by an ICH8R chip, and another by a Ggabyte SATA2 chip. would i be correct in thinking i have to change the port the hard drive is connected to, to get this working? or am i missing utilities of some sort. please advise :confused: , cheers in advance.
 
I'm pretty sure you can't flip the controller into AHCI mode without either reinstalling Windows or having a tremendous amount of hassle.

NCQ is of very little use in a single user desktop environment, the I/O queue never gets to a sufficient depth for NCQ to be able to make any real impression on performance.
 
i see, and is the added bandwidth worth it ? i just find my hard drive is the slowest part of the damn machine. whats the use in a overclocked c2d when you cant max it out because your HDD is too slow :mad: maybe its time i invest in a flash drive...
 
You can't just switch from IDE to ACHI or RAID, windows will fail to boot from my experience.

In terms of the original question, which ports do you have the drive connected to? What I did was build and install windows with the drive connected to the purple (GigaRAID) ports, set these to IDE mode in the BIOS and set the yellow (ICH8R) ports to ACHI. When windows finished installing and is running then I installed the Intel Matrix drivers, then I moved the drive over onto the yellow ports.
 
Use the DS4's other SATA port to boot up.
Enable AHCI in the bios and load Intel matrix drivers for it.
Swap drive back to the ICH8R SATA port.
Boot up :)
 
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