AHCI OR IDE

[StriperMike]

All,

I currently am installing Vista on a Asus P5K-E mobo with a Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA150 as my OS drive and a Western Digital Caviar 500GB SATAII as my data drive. I will not be using them in any type of RAID array.

My question is in the BIOS should I set the SATA mode to AHCI or IDE?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[Slugbait]

For a massive increase in performance, set to AHCI. When Windows install begins, hit F6. Have your floppy disk ready.

 

[Slugbait]

Oh wait...does Vista support AHCI out of the box? Errr...you may not need a floppy. I'm still running XP, so...

 

[PliotronX]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
For a massive increase in performance, set to AHCI. When Windows install begins, hit F6. Have your floppy disk ready.

Could you define massive? Doesn't AHCI just enable 300MB burst and NCQ?

 

[PepperBreath]

I'm not sure what experience Slugbait is coming from but from my own experience and a little research, you won't notice much difference between AHCI or IDE. Also, Vista supports AHCI out of the box.

When I had it enabled, I didn't notice any performance increase at all and there were some major compatibility problems with Acronis True Image which I use regularly to make backups. After a few months of AHCI (I installed it right off the bat with my current build), I tried IDE mode. No difference at all. I had benchmarked both modes and the HDD performance was identical (granted, I don't remember which programs I used to benchmark as this was about a month ago).

So I'm sticking with IDE mode for now since there was no noticeable boost otherwise. The few places I found that talked about AHCI mentioned that it's more of a server-minded technology and that desktop users would be hard-pressed to notice a difference. I believe it because that's been my experience.

 

[StriperMike]

Thanks for the replies! I'm a little skeptical that I will see a "massive" increase in performance. Ive read many reviews where they say NCQ helps and others where it says it hurts. I doubt I will see any increase in performance that I will notice outside of benchmark software. But since I do have NCQ I ended up enabling AHCI in the BIOS and Vista installed with no problems. I figure I paid for it so I might as well use it. I actually use Acronis as well (Home version 11) and I love it. They must have finally added native AHCI support because it recognizes all my SATA drives without loading any additonal drivers.

Thanks for the help.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
Oh wait...does Vista support AHCI out of the box? Errr...you may not need a floppy. I'm still running XP, so...

You don't need floppies to install hard drive controllers in Vista. You can use Floppy, CD, DVD, or USB Flash drive.

 

[Slugbait]

The new machine I built a few months ago has a Raptor for the system drive. I didn't know about setting AHCI in the BIOS, so I installed the OS and apps with the default IDE. My first impression was that I wasn't impressed at all with my Raptor. I wondered why I spent so much more for it.

My original mobo (D975XBX2) became faulty after about a month, and while waiting for the replacement I found out about AHCI. After getting the replacement and rebuilding fresh with AHCI, I was stunned by how fast my desktop finished loading on boot, and how quickly Office 2003 apps loaded up.

I didn't do benchmarks with the original mobo, so either I imagined the perf increase, or perhaps the mobo was faulty from the beginning and impacted my perf. And after doing some googling around, Pepper's post seems to have a lot of validity...except people with Raptors seem to recommend AHCI. Note that I'm using Intel SATA and have disabled Marvell in the BIOS.

I also had major problems with True Image (I'm using version 8). I could create an image, but couldn't restore: it wouldn't even see my Raptor. Like an idiot, I troubleshot it for days before checking if there was a newer v8 build to download from Acronis. Once I updated, it worked perfectly.

 

[Slugbait]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger

Originally posted by: Slugbait
Oh wait...does Vista support AHCI out of the box? Errr...you may not need a floppy. I'm still running XP, so...

You don't need floppies to install hard drive controllers in Vista. You can use Floppy, CD, DVD, or USB Flash drive.

You can also use Vista...I verified the install supports AHCI out of the box.

 

[Rubycon]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
For a massive increase in performance, set to AHCI. When Windows install begins, hit F6. Have your floppy disk ready.

Ron Reaugh, is that you?

EDIT: Get upgraded to TI Echo Workstation - it's much faster and recognizes much more controllers.