AHCI

[SKULLOTOI]

Well from what I understand running AHCI is suppose to make your HDD faster and overall performance faster. I have tried running AHCI with three different hard drives and is for sure for sure for sure makes my whole machine SIGNIFICANTLY slower. WAYYYYYYYYY SLOWER than running it in just emulation mode off. it seriously though takes me back to the days of windows 95 and dos. no joke it gets that slow. not to mention my machine just begins to do wierd stuff when if id game watch tv even surf the web the whole thing just acts all strange and slow. My mobo seems to run a whole different bios for ahci. its an intel chipset and i know they have difficulties with ahci but com'on.

Is there any short of steps i need to take to see improvments with ahci, will ahci give me any sorts of improvments over just emulation off?

Setup
Gigabyte X48 DS4

4GB Corsair ram

E3110

1 Velociraptor

8800GTS 512

Vista Home Prem 64 bit

Moved to appropriate forum - Moderator Rubcyon

 

[The Keeper]

I tried AHCI when I first built my current gaming rig, it was a failure. My motherboard has ICH9 (not the R-variant) but BIOS supports AHCI anyway, Intel however only provides AHCI drivers for the R-variants. This wasn't a big issue as Windows Vista supports AHCI natively, it doesn't need Intel's AHCI drivers. While my HDD was quite fast in AHCI mode (I suppose it was thanks to great NCQ implementation in Seagate 7200.11 series*) the system behaved strangely. In the end I found out that ever so slight data corruption occurred every now and then. Because of the slight data corruption, I ended up disabling AHCI, reformatting HDD and reinstalling Vista.

Don't quote me on this but I seem to recall reading that Western Digital Raptors had poor NCQ implementation. It might have carried over to the Velociraptors too, which would explain your poor performance with AHCI enabled. From Storagereview site I have gotten the impression that most consumer laptop and desktop drives don't have firmware optimized for NCQ unlike their workstation and server cousins. This is probably because NCQ adds latency due to command re-ordering which translates to poorer performance in single-user environments.

*http://forums.storagereview.ne...=26006

Edit: Another topic about NCQ implementation in hard drives: http://forums.storagereview.ne...p?showtopic=26965&st=0

 

[Cogman]

Reading comprehension for the lose.

http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=1605319&enterthread=y

Do NOT post trouble shooting questions here. My goodness, what can the moderators do to prevent this? Does it really take THAT much of your time to read the very top sticky, At very least the title of the sticky? What do you think, it is floating up there for someone else.... It really boggles my mind.