AHCI setting in bios

[dc9mm3]

I asked this over on motherboard forum but thought it might be better asked here since its about SSD drive.

Iam rebuilding my system using a Q6600 cpu on a Asus P5Q SE Plus motherboard its a intel P45 chipset. It supports AHCI. I want to use AHCI because i also bought a Intel X25-M (80 gig) solid state drive, installing Win 7 64 bit. The SSD drive will be the C drive with OS and programs installed on it.

Question if i set the BIOS to AHCI for the serial control will my DVD and my 4 other regular hard drives which are all serial type which have alot of files on from my current win XP 32 bit work correctly or at all? I want to be able to acess files on older hard drive. Have like 400 gig worth of photos and things like that.

I dont want to install Win 7 onto SSD drive and then connect my other hard drives and find out i cant access them because of the AHCI setting. If this happens i will have to redo the install of the OS over again with IDE for the serial setting in bios. I suppose if the AHCI setting makes my DVD drive unreadable i guess i wont get to far as i wont be installing anything then.

Oh yea reason i want to use AHCI is so TRIM will work automaticly once intel gets the firmware working corectly.

 

[linster]

AHCI shouldn't affect data on your HDs. The issue with enabling AHCI that you hear about has to do mostly with the boot drive. If you all of a sudden enable AHCI in BIOS with windows having old non AHCI drivers accessing your boot drive, the first time it tries to load into windows is where the problem is. The scenario you described, you should be safe enabling AHCI.

 

[gbohn]

> The scenario you described, you should be safe enabling AHCI.

FWIW, I just added an Intel X25-M 160 GB SSD to my system (Asus Ramage Formula X48). Before I started I was set up as IDE. I found and followed a recommendation on how to switch to AHCI mode (for Vista).

The claim was that Vista (64 Bit SP 2 in my case) needed to have a registry value changed to tell it to also load the MS AHCI drivers (before switching the BIOS setting).

(I believe it was to got to the registry entry HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci and update the 'Start' key value from 4 to 0.)

I don't know if that was needed or not, but I did this, shutdown, switched the BIOS setting to AHCI and rebooted. Everything came up o.k. (at the time, my two regular physical SATA drives and a SATA Blu-ray burner).

As always, Win 7 may be different and your mileage may vary...

-Greg

 

[dc9mm3]

Thanks guys. So i will be ok its just the boot drive that will be effected by the bios setting for AHCI setting. Thtas fine with what i will be doing. Iam real curous to see how fast win 7 is with a SSD drive.

 

[n7]

The other drives will also utilize AHCI, but as you are doing a clean install of Win7 (which has the driver built in), i see no reason for problems.