Can you use AHCI with non-SSD drive?

B

Bird222

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 1, 2000
Messages
1,287
I am wanting to change my SATA settings to AHCI but the drive is not SSD. Is that ok? Also, what is the best technique for doing this in Windows 10?
 
AHCI has nothing to do with whether it is an HDD or SSD, it is just an interface setting for the sata interface. However, if you did not already have your existing Windows install setup with AHCI by default, you will probably have to reinstall everything from scratch.
 
The three common modes for the SATA interface that you will see in the BIOS are IDE, AHCI, and RAID.

IDE is a compatibility mode setting that ignores/disables some features of modern drives (such as NCQ - very important for the best hard drive performance).

AHCI (or Advanced Host Controller Interface) is the current interface technology for SATA drives, and all drive features are fully available using it.

RAID (not available on all motherboards) is for hardware assistance in combining multiple smaller drives together to appear to the OS as a single large volume (RAID 0) or to keep a mirror copy of a hard drive (or array of hard drives) on an identical drive or set of drives (RAID 1). This also requires that you install the chipset RAID driver for the motherboard to get this to work properly. As far as I know, all motherboard SATA RAID controllers support and automatically use AHCI features on attached drives. Since these controllers don't appear as normal drive controllers to Windows, most of these will not let Windows DRIVE Optimizer perform a TRIM command on SATA SSDs (The SSD equivalent of a Defrag) while attached to a controller in RAID mode, even if the drive is not actually a part of any RAID array.

Normally if you install Windows with the boot hard drive in IDE mode, it does not enable Windows built-in AHCI support. Just changing the BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI in this case will likely result in a BSOD for Inaccessible Boot Device as Windows does not have the required support enabled and the computer will just keep boot cycling. Changing the setting back will get you back into Windows, no harm no foul.

However, it is possible to manually enable AHCI support in Windows before changing the BIOS setting via RegEdit. If you do this and THEN change the BIOS, it should work fine with the new mode. BONUS: Going from AHCI to IDE always works with Windows; it's just going from IDE to AHCI that requires the extra step.

On Windows 10, I've had good luck with this method. There is a non-registry method using BCDEDIT from the Windows Command Line, but that sometimes doesn't work fore me. The registry change on the other hand seems to always work.

Of course, you can also always just reinstall Windows from scratch with AHCI set in the BIOS. That always works, too. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top