Switching from IDE to AHCI

thrudge · 9 Jul 2012 at 11:46

Hi,

I've currently got 3 drives:

Boot drive - SSD on a SATA 3 port
2 x data drives - mechanical on SATA 2 ports

The BIOS is set to treat them all as IDE. Presumably, I'd get better performance out of the SSD if I set the BIOS to AHCI?

If I did this, would I have to format the SSD and reinstall the OS (Win7)? And would the OS see the mechanical data drives?

james.miller · 9 Jul 2012 at 11:50

no, no and yes it would.

if windows 7 was installed in in IDE mode then there's a driver that needs to be enabled before you change the bios to achi.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

read that, click on the 'fix it for me' link and run the .msi it downloads. then you can reboot and set the bios to achi and windows should then boot up fine.

thrudge · 9 Jul 2012 at 12:17

Yep, that works a treat - thank you

BTW, read speeds are up from 364Mb/s to 463 - woo-hoo!

james.miller · 9 Jul 2012 at 14:48

nice

Menty · 9 Jul 2012 at 23:00

james.miller said:
no, no and yes it would.

if windows 7 was installed in in IDE mode then there's a driver that needs to be enabled before you change the bios to achi.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

read that, click on the 'fix it for me' link and run the .msi it downloads. then you can reboot and set the bios to achi and windows should then boot up fine.

I wish I had seen this post about an hour ago