AHCI is unbearable with MS & AMD Drivers

[Nucleus111]

Just installed Win 7 x64 on an Asus M4A87TD EVO (AMD 870) with AHCI enabled in the BIOS before hand.

The problem is that my HD activity is completely unbearable! I mean I can click on the start menu and have to wait a minute! That was with the standard MS drivers. Changing over to the 10.9 AMD SATA driver made things better, but not fixed.

The only thing that works is if I put the HD in IDE mode. Everything flies then.

HA!!!!.....
as I'm typing this I tried one last thing; changing the SATA mode in the BIOS from auto to 3Gb (the other option was 6Gb).
I'll still post this for anyone else that might find themselves with this issue.

 

[Nucleus111]

Scratch that...
It was a failing disk.

 

[Nucleus111]

Scratch that again.....

It seems some old (~4-5yr.) SATA drives are not compatible with AHCI either on my new board or in general.
One of them was a data drive that was known to be good up until the new hardware and Win7 install; previously XP. It showed the same exact issues as when the other one was the boot drive -- controller errors and 100% usage time with 0 data throughput. Changed a port to IDE mode for it and no more issues and normal speeds.

...I thought all SATA drives were supposed to work with AHCI?