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AHCI ruined everything.

dave_the_nerd

dave_the_nerd

Lifer
Ok, so I have a vertex 3, it was working fine jn IDE mode. But directions said to run in AHCI mode if possible.

So I did the registry edit to enable AHCI, installed the intel driver, rebooted, enabled in bios, rebooted again... Everything was painfully slow. Launching applications would lock the computer.

I let it sit for a bit, and when I came back, it was dead. System repair says I don't have a system partition. Boot error.

But it did boot before, and the drivers installed and were working.

So what's the most likely culprit here?
 
I take it a month ago was post April 24th when the 2.22 (pdf) firmware was released.

I will say the drive I had go bad from OCZ, a Petrol 64gb. Died after exhibiting the same symptoms. It was running fine, I enabled AHCI, it wouldn't boot fully, etc.
 
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AHCI is faster than IDE/ATA/compatibility mode or whatever else people call it. Whether it is worth it is whether you can be bothered to reformat with AHCI enabled.

Is the difference between IDE and AHCI like a HDD and an SSD? No way, more like a last generation SSD vs a current generation SSD.
 
If your against reformatting, leave it in IDE mode.

Your going to see like a 5% difference in speed in most scenarios if I remember correctly.
Up to you!
 
I switched from IDE mode to AHCI mode with both of my Intel drives, without issues.

Maybe you should just try a repair-install to see if that gets things working - if not then reformat/install.
 
I wonder if the drive was aligned properly for AHCI mode? Run AS-SSD and see if the drive is listed as OK in alignment.
 
Engineer said:
If you search Yahoo or Google (AHCI vs IDE SSD), you'll find several articles showing the comparisons. From what I read, AHCI kicks the teeth in of IDE, but not sure if that's just benchmarks or benchmarks and real world testing.
Click to expand...

Usually just benchmarks with a high que depth due to AHCI having NCQ. There will be some real world situations where there is an improvment, but they're relatively rare for a "normal" user.
 
(sic)Klown12 said:
Usually just benchmarks with a high que depth due to AHCI having NCQ. There will be some real world situations where there is an improvment, but they're relatively rare for a "normal" user.
Click to expand...
Even if they're minor or unnoticeable, it's free performance. Why not go for it?
 
Engineer said:
I wonder if the drive was aligned properly for AHCI mode? Run AS-SSD and see if the drive is listed as OK in alignment.
Click to expand...
Any aligment issues will manifest themselves in IDE mode too. All that'll happen is write performance for small files will be slower.

Homeles said:
Even if they're minor or unnoticeable, it's free performance. Why not go for it?
Click to expand...
On some motherboards (like mine) enabling AHCI adds to the POST time over IDE. Also for situations like the OP where AHCI isn't working.
 
Engineer said:
If you search Yahoo or Google (AHCI vs IDE SSD), you'll find several articles showing the comparisons. From what I read, AHCI kicks the teeth in of IDE, but not sure if that's just benchmarks or benchmarks and real world testing.
Click to expand...
It's both, and the feature you're really seeing working for you is NCQ. You will notice some sites, like AT, use fairly low QDs, which occur in typical usage. High QDs, like 32 and 64, are unrealistic for desktop or mobile use. You can generally consider anything over 8 to be far more than you care about, and even that should be fairly heavy with an SSD. On HDDs, you should feel the difference, whereas SSDs it should generally help with corner cases, and when competing with background I/O.

Instead of the OS scheduling reads and writes in software, not knowing much about your drive (but, admittedly, knowing more about outstanding IO and IOs that will soon need servicing), it can send reads and writes to your drive, and the drive can order them as it sees fit, within some bounds. Without command queuing, the OS has to wait for the drive to finish the last operation, before the next one can be done. Since the drive makers know more about their drives than MS does, the drive can be made to schedule itself better than Windows can schedule for it. On a fairly modern SSD, whether you are fast enough to notice a difference is a big question, of course.
 
Why did you install the Intel driver? Personally, I prefer avoiding making two significant system changes at once. Also, I've swapped between IDE and AHCI before using the registry method without any problems.

EDIT:

To note, I always use Microsoft's default AHCI driver.
 
Aikouka said:
Why did you install the Intel driver? Personally, I prefer avoiding making two significant system changes at once. Also, I've swapped between IDE and AHCI before using the registry method without any problems.

EDIT:

To note, I always use Microsoft's default AHCI driver.
Click to expand...

Because the Microsoft one didn't work, and the AHCI info I found suggested that Intel > Microsoft > nVidia AHCI drivers.
 
I installed mine (OCZ Agility3 240) and switched from IDE to AHCI with not problems at all. Sounds like a driver issue to me.
 
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