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Question about IDE/AHCI

T

Timmah!

Golden Member
Hello there,

i have little question regarding BIOS setting to AHCI mode and what does it mean when it comes to IDE oprical drive...

Recently i built nice new rig for rendering purposes (980x, 12 gigs of RAM, gigabyte x58a ud7, 2x x-25 80GB SSD, Caviar Green 2TB and GTX460 Goes Like Hell...)
This week i finally managed to put together with exception of optical drive, which i plan to use from my old computer...but right now i found out it is a IDE drive (not SATA)...apparently i need the drive to install Win7 from DVD.

There is a lot talk around that for the best performance of SSD´s and Win7, BIOS should be put into AHCI mode...and here comes the problem:
there is a shitload of SATA related stuff in the BIOS and i am not really sure, where to enable it... i suppose it is the ICH SATA Control Mode option, but is it? And will my IDE dvd burner work now, if i set BIOS to AHCI mode?
Obviously i could give it a try and see myself, but i am not in a mood of putting the drive into case and the find out, it wont work whatsoever...and the putting it out again...so if anyone here does have any knowledge about this and coud help me, i would be grateful...

Thank you
 
There is usually a setting for your Intel SATA ports, for RAID/AHCI/IDE mode. IDE mode makes the SATA drives look like an IDE controller to the software (good for installing XP, for example). AHCI is more modern, and requires Vista/Win7 to install, or a floppy drive with XP, and having to hit F6 during installation to load drivers.

If you are talking about a physical IDE optical drive, then you will have to see if your board implements a physical IDE port. Most boards still do, although since Intel dropped that support from the system chipset, that means that support is provided by a third-party chipset, usually tied to the PCI-E bus. The Jmicron JMB363 is one popular chip, which provides two extra SATA ports, and an IDE port.

There will be seperate settings in the BIOS for these third-party controller chips. But as a general rule, if it has a physical IDE port on the mobo, it should work fine, unless it's disabled in the BIOS. You might have to do some work in the BIOS to select boot order for your HDs and Optical drives.
 
I believe like Larry said the IDE and SATA controllers are totally seperate on your x58 board so you should be able to enable AHCI on all SATA drives while the IDE controller acts as exactly that, an IDE controller only used for optical disk drives.

I don't have an AHCI motherboard but my friend does and had the exact same problem of not being able to install Win 7 from a SATA optical drive. He ended up copying all of the files from the DVD to a 4GB flash drive and installing from that.
 
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