"Just a quick reminder for everyone on NCQ. It provides no performance benefit whatsoever in a typical desktop PC. In fact having it enabled usually imposes a small performance penalty, although it too is pretty small. It is only in enterprise environments, in which access patterns are far more random than in windows, and spread out all over the surface of a drive, that any real-word benefit is derived."
That is simply incorrect.
As for why AHCI.
AHCI allows a variety of modern functions, including NCQ, TRIM, and hotplug.
NCQ allows drives to better control their writing if they support it. Some drives are known to have horrible NCQ implementation as a "checkmark feature" which degrades performance a lot across the board, but those are fairly rare and old... (I think, the very first gen raptor was one... fixed in later gens)
There is another performance "degradation" referred to found in all SPINDLE Drives using NCQ, where there is a loss in sequential speeds and a boost in random access speed. It was believed, in the past, that only sequential speeds matter to the "home user" and random does not; but that is simply not true and it greatly benefits even home users to have it enabled...
This myth is how we got thing like the terrible jmicron controller. Not all beleived it, as an example, the raptor series focused a lot on random speeds.
Today it is known that random speeds are more valuable even to the home user, which is part of the huge benefit of the intel and vertex SSDs. (although they are faster in sequential too).
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