AHCI and using a storage drive

[Panopticon]

I just ordered a Samsung 830 from the egg and I was reading about SSD optimization but I cant find any information about how AHCI affects a storage drive. I will use a mechanical for storage so will any secondary drives still be set up as IDE or does changing the main drive to AHCI force all other drives to use the AHCI drivers? Very confused...

 

[Elixer]

There is no reason not to use AHCI for all drives, and there are good reasons for not using "IDE" drivers for all drives.
The biggest issue is that "IDE" drivers don't have hot swap capabilities, and for storage drives, that is a huge minus.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I would say that NCQ is the biggest advantage you get from AHCI. If your motherboard supports AHCI you should use it (or RAID mode, if it has that option).

 

[Panopticon]

I have never set up a raid but when mechanical drives come back to normal pricing I would like to have two storage drives in the type of configuration that allows one drive to fail and not lose my data (raid 5?) It is so frustrating to look at these sky high drive prices.

 

[LokutusofBorg]

That would be RAID 1 (mirroring). If you select RAID mode in your BIOS that doesn't mean you *have* to set up RAID. It just means you can in the future without changing anything. I have never heard of a mobo RAID mode that isn't equivalent to the standard AHCI setting if you're not using RAID.

 

[bryanW1995]

Ha, that was a pleasant surprise to me. I ran my x25m g2 in ide mode for 2 years b/c I screwed up when first installing windows and never took the time to look up the fix for enabling ahci mode. Now I'm in raid mode, which I thought would disable ahci, but I looked at my RST settings yesterday and noticed that NCQ was enabled on all my drives.