SATA II Drive

Jonnygrunge · 16 Jun 2008 at 23:27

Guys I have a single 500GB Deskstar SATA II drive what BIOS setting would you recommend having the drive set at, IDE or AHCI for best performance and why?
Thanks in advance,
Jonnygrunge.

Cob · 16 Jun 2008 at 23:39

If you're going to install Windows onto it then set it to AHCI and load the RAID drivers during the install (if installing Vista it will already have the drivers).

Jonnygrunge · 16 Jun 2008 at 23:46

I have Windows XP installed with the RAID drivers installed (F6 Setup) At the moment the drive is set to AHCI (Gigabyte RAID controller) I use the Intel RAID for hotplugging my backup HDD through the PCI backpanel supplied with the mobo, this controller has to be set to AHCI, I do this as most of the Intel SATA ports are covered by my 8800GTX!

I was wondering if with a single SATA II drive, IDE mode is OK? or just leave it in AHCI? What mode gives best performance? I have noticed through HDD tach that very occasionally my drive seems to drop down to about 150MB/s burst speed!
My normal results though are:

Burst speed: 263MB/s
Random access: 13ms
Average read: 64MB/s

Are these benchies OK?

AbsenceJam · 17 Jun 2008 at 00:53

Unless you need hotswapping (which depending on controller may still be supported in IDE mode via drivers) then I would always suggest IDE. NCQ reduces performance for single user use (though sometimes you can have AHCI and turn NCQ on/off) and lots of optical drives very much dislike AHCI. There's no general performance advantage, just the hotswapping and drawbacks.

Jonnygrunge · 17 Jun 2008 at 08:43

AbsenceJam said:
Unless you need hotswapping (which depending on controller may still be supported in IDE mode via drivers) then I would always suggest IDE. NCQ reduces performance for single user use (though sometimes you can have AHCI and turn NCQ on/off) and lots of optical drives very much dislike AHCI. There's no general performance advantage, just the hotswapping and drawbacks.

Thanks, yes as I stated above I need the AHCI for the Intel RAID controller for hotplugging my backup drive, I will then change my Gigabyte RAID controller to IDE mode for my system HDD if there is no performance drawbacks in this mode, the benchmarks seem to prove this.