AHCI or IDE?

[lessonz]

I have a Raptor, SpinPoint, and ASUS P5K Premium. Should I bother with AHCI? Thanks.

 

[PurdueRy]

I haven't yet. I have only had problems trying to install them in AHCI mode. Unless you want hot swap, you'll never know the difference.

 

[fpbear]

Is hot swap the only difference between IDE and AHCI?

I have some SATA problems with my P5K Premium (sensitive about which ports are used, RAID does not work with Vista x64). While searching forums I found that some people recommend using AHCI mode, but there is no explanation why.

Any reason why AHCI would work better than IDE for this board?

 

[LikeLinus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHCI

It also allows for NCQ

 

[Drexl]

Is NCQ worth it though? It seems that in some instances it's slower.

I have a couple of other questions:

1. What about connecting an optical drive to the same SATA controller as hard drives when the controller is set for AHCI? There doesn't seem to be a way to make some ports AHCI and some IDE, so I wonder if the optical drive will work or if it needs the port to be in IDE mode.

2. On the hard drive I will be using, I have a 40GB partition that I'm going to reformat and install Vista on, along with a 250GB+ partition for media, documents, downloads, etc. and I'm not using AHCI. Typically what I do is when I want to reinstall I just reformat the C: partition leaving D: intact. This time though, if I set up the drive for AHCI mode (pressing F6 for the driver) will it affect the other partition? I was just wondering if that second partition/data will be unreadable by the now AHCI-enabled OS.

 

[PurdueRy]

Originally posted by: Drexl
Is NCQ worth it though? It seems that in some instances it's slower.

I have a couple of other questions:

1. What about connecting an optical drive to the same SATA controller as hard drives when the controller is set for AHCI? There doesn't seem to be a way to make some ports AHCI and some IDE, so I wonder if the optical drive will work or if it needs the port to be in IDE mode.

2. On the hard drive I will be using, I have a 40GB partition that I'm going to reformat and install Vista on, along with a 250GB+ partition for media, documents, downloads, etc. and I'm not using AHCI. Typically what I do is when I want to reinstall I just reformat the C: partition leaving D: intact. This time though, if I set up the drive for AHCI mode (pressing F6 for the driver) will it affect the other partition? I was just wondering if that second partition/data will be unreadable by the now AHCI-enabled OS.

NCQ generally slows performance very slightly in a non-server environment

 

[ViRGE]

AHCI isn't any kind of massive improvement, but at the very least it is the future. If you're building a system that will be running WinVista (which has native AHCI support) and not WinXP, you may as well go AHCI.

 

[fpbear]

1. What about connecting an optical drive to the same SATA controller as hard drives when the controller is set for AHCI? There doesn't seem to be a way to make some ports AHCI and some IDE, so I wonder if the optical drive will work or if it needs the port to be in IDE mode

I didn't think of this before, never tried it, does anyone know the answer? In a few days I will hook up two drives that support NCQ and a SATA Samsung Writemaster DVD. Can these all go on the ICH9R ports with AHCI?

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: fpbear

1. What about connecting an optical drive to the same SATA controller as hard drives when the controller is set for AHCI? There doesn't seem to be a way to make some ports AHCI and some IDE, so I wonder if the optical drive will work or if it needs the port to be in IDE mode

I didn't think of this before, never tried it, does anyone know the answer? In a few days I will hook up two drives that support NCQ and a SATA Samsung Writemaster DVD. Can these all go on the ICH9R ports with AHCI?

Vista shouldn't have a problem with most drives. YMMV with anything else.

 

[Old Hippie]

Here's a little reading about the common problems of switching to ACHI under Windows.