AHCI vs. IDE - is it worth it?

[swillfly]

I read somewhere that I can make my SATA HDD use AHCI in BIOS instead of IDE upon a clean install of (in my case) Win7 64bit. I'm not sure that I want to do a clean install with AHCI because of the cons versus pros that I've read online while googling.

AMD PhenomII x4 955
Gigabyte GA-790XT-USB3 (Southbridge AMD SB750)
4 GB DDR3 1333 RAM
500 GB Western Digital SATA HDD WD5000AAKS
Window 7 Ultimate 64bit single partition
single Radeon 5770

With AHCI you can hot swap drives and NCQ. But I only have one HDD and do not plan on having a RAID setup. Is the drive access read/write going to be significantly faster using AHCI?

Additionally it seems there are stability issues with the MS drivers for AHCI and elsewhere some folks experienced extended bootup times due to AHCI loading.

Why would I want a clean install of Win7 using AHCI instead of IDE? Will the performance gain really be worthwhile/noticable when playing my games? What incentive would I have for using AHCI in a single HDD gaming rig?

 

[TemjinGold]

You don't. It's not worth the hassle if you are only considering it for the speed increase as you would barely notice. If you were using an SSD, that's one thing.

 

[ss284]

You can go to AHCI without reinstall. I believe its some sort of registry change and driver install. Try googling it.

 

[HumblePie]

You don't. It's not worth the hassle if you are only considering it for the speed increase as you would barely notice. If you were using an SSD, that's one thing.

^ this pretty much. For mechanical drives you won't notice a significant increase in performance unless are doing some massive sequential file IO crap like video encoding. Then it's a little bit of a performance boost. That's because of the seek time still limits how well NCQ works with regular hard drives. Now with an SSD with practically zero seek time, it's a major boost in performance to use NCQ and it can make use of the larger bandwidth provided. Regular hard drives just do not have the sustained speeds to make AHCI noticeable.

So if you are experiencing problems in AHCI mode, just use the IDE mode for your motherboard. If you have an SSD, I recommend though to do whatever you can to use AHCI.

 

[Gunbuster]

OS feels the slightest bit "snappier" in AHCI mode. Though it could just be placebo effect.

If you plan on using ESATA drives go with AHCI.

How to change after install: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976