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Questions about SATA mode

C

carlmart

Gawd
Joined
Sep 17, 2006
Messages
691
Two days ago I installed a new Win 7 in a brand new Crucial M4 256Gb on my desktop.

To do that I tried to read everything I could on which was the right way to do things.

That's how I learnt about different SATA modes that I could setup on the mobo BIOS.

In my case I had IDE, AHCI and RAID, and everybody recommended using AHCI for SSDs.

What was not mentioned is that that mode would be incompatible with other HDs where the OS was not the same when Windows was installed.

As I use to move between XP and Win 7, I couldn't understand what was happening with those installs I had that were done in IDE mode, that got me a blue screen.

I am not willing to choose modes every time I switch between drives, so I researched a bit more on the advantages AHCI might bring me versus IDE.

It seems to be that AHCI will not increase any speed or anything, and would only be useful if I were to hot-swap my drives, which I am not planning on doing. Am I right?

So how is it? As it is I am planning on quick re-formatting the SSD and go back to IDE mode. Any comments or opinions against that?
 
AHCI mode should be supported under Windows XP. You might have to re-install the OS though, as the boot-up drivers your old installation might be looking for are the older IDE drivers. I know that switching controllers in XP typically means a re-install of the OS.

I'd stick with AHCI mode, and re-install the older OS.
 
What advantage would AHCI bring to my system?

Apparently speed is not one of them, and it would only allow hot-swapping my drives, which I have no intention on doing.

From what I could find googling, AHCI only advantages are hot-swap and NCQ (Native Command Queueing). NCQ seems non important for single users, which is my case.

Is there any other advantage?
 
"What was not mentioned is that that mode would be incompatible with other HDs where the OS was not the same when Windows was installed. "

Can you explain this a bit more? What kinda drives do you have and how are they formatted?
 
All drives are NTFS formatted. What I meant, and sorry if it was not clear, is that if you set the BIOS SATA mode to IDE or AHCI, and then install Windows, the OS will only be recognized as the SATA mode is the same as when installed.

If you have an HDD where Windows was installed in say, IDE mode, and then you set BIOS to AHCD you will get blue screen if you try to boot from it. Don't matter if it's XP or Win 7.

This happened to me and at first I thought there was something wrong with the HDDs.

Let's hope now I was clear.
 
But those changes seem not be a sure thing: on some cases it works, on others it doesn't. That's something I could find out.

My problem is I have two separate HDDs where I installed XP and Win 7, both in IDE mode. I wish to keep them as backup in case something goes wrong with the SSD.

The XP HDD serves me to run some programs I had trouble with my last Win 7 install. This time I will block MS updates for Win 7, which I have done for a long time in XP having none of the conflicts and problems I had had.

It's OK to reinstall XP again in AHCI mode if I have to, but I'm not convinced that I have to... yet.

That's why I was looking for some advice of pros and cons here.
 
Keep your hard drive outside your machine as your "backup"

Run Windows XP in a virtual machine inside windows 7.
 
Two problems: external HDDs are not that easy to accomplish here where I live. Only single HDD boxes are available, and very few are USB3. And we are talking about 6 HDDs working together, to hold my video files and my video editing media.

Second, dual boot or virtual machine inside W7 are also out. It's the same as partitions: some like them, some don't. I don't like partitions and prefer separate boot options, on separate HDDs.

In this thread what I need help on is whether I should use IDE mode on my BIOS, instead of AHCI, just that. About the HDDs arrangement I discussed this on a specific thread and my mind is made up.
 
One of the advantages that AHCI mode brings over the emulated IDE mode is NCQ (command queuing). That means your controller can send multiple commands to the drive to execute at once, and return the results of them as they become available. With IDE mode, your controller can only send one command at a time. Hot-plug is also added, and that can be more useful than you think. There are numerous other advantages to AHCI as well, but they likely won't affect you if all you are after is speed.

Indeed to install the AHCI drivers under Windows XP you will likely need to re-install Windows. This isn't strictly speaking necessary, but you'd have to boot XP with both the old IDE and the AHCI modes active at the same time to install the drivers without wiping windows, and you can't do that.
 
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