IDE / AHCI

R

Rossi~

2[H]4U
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Dec 8, 2008
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I've only this second realised i built my OS on the raptor with IDE not AHCI. I've been reading up on which is best and it would seem that AHCI is better in SOME tests, but not all and infact looking over and 4 reviews it would seem that it's 50/50.
I am unable to use AHCI without reinstalling the OS unless i do some REG crap, or is there a different way?
What do you guys think? Shall i just leave it in IDE mode and stop rambling on?
 
AHCI IMHO is the way to go if you can. I believe it supports advanced features like hot swap, NCQ, etc. I could be wrong. Someone please correct me, but I don't think IDE "mode" supports hot swap + NCQ.
 
Robstar & Wipeout are correct about NCQ and hotswap.

Try enabling it with that registry setting trick and do your testing.

You can switch it back to IDE at any time with no problems.

It's usually the people that don't have Intel SB chips experiencing slow downs with AHCI enabled.

PSSS....That registry trick will only work with Vista and W7.
 
Done.
I'm using W7, already had regedit open at the time of reading your responses so just done it, works a treat and noticed already that it's quicker booting everything.

Cheers all
 
Rossi~ said:
Done.
I'm using W7, already had regedit open at the time of reading your responses so just done it, works a treat and noticed already that it's quicker booting everything.

Cheers all
Click to expand...

Cool Beans and Merry Christmas!
 
AHCI slowed down my velociraptor alittle, but it has benefits. Intel SSD's almost certainly require AHCI for optimal use.
 
Sorry for the partial hijack here. I just went into regedit to check on my entry and it seems it is already enabled, but I still get the BSOD when I change over from IDE to AHCI on my Intel SSD (Win7 installed). Any ideas?
 
strid3r said:
Sorry for the partial hijack here. I just went into regedit to check on my entry and it seems it is already enabled, but I still get the BSOD when I change over from IDE to AHCI on my Intel SSD (Win7 installed). Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Strange...
By default it should be set to '3' and needs to be '0' . I just changed it to 0 and all was good.
 
The speeds of the drive increased, but the AHCI on velociraptors uses alot of cpu. Very high cpu useage.
 
ShuttleLuv said:
The speeds of the drive increased, but the AHCI on velociraptors uses alot of cpu. Very high cpu useage.
Click to expand...

Really? I hadn't noticed that at all. Would i be able to see anything with a 3.93GHz 8 threaded cpu? lol
 
ShuttleLuv said:
AHCI slowed down my velociraptor alittle, but it has benefits. Intel SSD's almost certainly require AHCI for optimal use.
Click to expand...

Surprisingly, most SATA hard drives perform best with AHCI enabled, even those that don't support NCQ. I have an early (in fact, SATA-150) Maxtor DiamondMax 200 GB SATA HD (dates back to 2004) that doesn't support NCQ (most HDDs of that era don't), but does support (and performs best with) AHCI enabled.

AHCI is actually quite old on the OS-support front, with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 supporting it first on the non-Linux front (however, the various open-source Linux distributions, the BSDs, and MacOS also gained support at that same period - early 2004). The biggest issue with AHCI is that it's all-or-nothing, and has issues with optical drives (DVD burners, mostly) of early vintages (later SATA optical drives, especially those from the various consortia, such as Toshiba/Samsung or Sony NEC, don't have that issue).

If none of your SATA drives are optical (or those that are date after 2008) and you're running any version of Windows later than XPSP2, OS X 10.5 or later, or any 2.6.x Linux-based distribution (or BSD based on FreeBSD 7 or later), you should enable AHCI in your BIOS for best performance.
 
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