Running an SSD without AHCI?

[techs]

Interesting issue. Tried installing an intel x25-m on a MSI g31m motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16813130124
http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&maincat_no=1&prod_no=1293

AS SSD shows the drive in IDE mode. I checked in the bios and can't find a setting for AHCI.
The closest thing is Integrated Peripherals-On Chip ATA devices which is set to IDE and cannot be changed.

Anyone know if the board supports AHCI? How to enable it in the bios?
And if not, is there anything special I need to do after installing the drive?

 

[CurseTheSky]

The G31 chipset is paired with the ICH7 southbridge, which DOES NOT offer AHCI. I found that out with my Gigabyte G31 board.

 

[WildW]

I wouldn't worry too much - from experience you don't lose very much, if you can even notice it at all.

 

[sub.mesa]

AHCI means you can use NCQ, which increases the random read performance of your SSD by a factor of 10 (actually, the number of channels; Intel has 10; Sandforce/Micron have 8; Indilinx have 4). SSDs are already very fast; but in IDE mode the random IOps would be 20MB/s max; while with AHCI it could be up to 200MB/s. That's quite a difference for a simple BIOS setting change.

If you got a really old chipset that does not support AHCI that's too bad; little you can do about it. One additional bad thing is that TRIM commands can block all other I/O in IDE mode; while in AHCI mode the TRIM requests would be processed in the background (the SSD can receive up to 32 requests simultaniously; i.e. with command queueing).