To AHCI or not to AHCI?

[DarkRogue]

Hello everyone,

My main rig's system drive died (or is dying, rather) so I've got an RMA on the way.
Everything started feeling really slow recently, and explorer would randomly hang or stall for a few minutes, and it would take a long time to shut down. Long story short, I powered it off and haven't been able to boot back into Windows because the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM file is corrupt, and the entire config folder is inaccessible.

I don't have any crucial data on it, as I figured something would happen and had my stuff on another drive to begin with, although it still works in my external enclosure. It's detected as a RAW file system but the files are still there, if they're not corrupt.

Anyway, with a new drive coming in, I'm wondering whether or not it's time to give AHCI another go. My system is in my sig (Sakura - I'm currently on my laptop "Ayu" while waiting for the RMA drive.) I will be once again running Windows XP, as I don't particularly like Vista, and I'm not ready to make the leap to Windows7 yet. Loading the AHCI drivers won't be a problem as I'll just slipstream them into the image along with SP3. My question is if it's worth it right now, and if I'll run into any big problems.

My system drive will be another WD Raptor 1500ADFD.
My data drives are 2x WD 5000AAKS, 1x 6400AAKS, and 1 Raptor 740GD that I'm going to be replacing with a 1001FALS (I put my page file on the 6400AAKS and I'm going to partition part of the 1001FALS to be a "scratch drive")
I also have 1 more 5000AAKS, as well as a 15EADS as a data backup drive both in external enclosures via eSATA.

So, all of my hard drives are SATA; AHCI looks like it would be fine to use. I'm already using AHCI for the JMicron controller my 2 externals are hooked up to. Up until now though, all the other drives (plus a SATA optical drive) were running in IDE mode because I didn't know about it last time I installed Windows. If I suddenly switch to AHCI now, would any of the old data drives run into any problems, since they were originally running in IDE mode? Should I even bother?

My laptop has been running in AHCI mode since I first booted it up, and I notice it consistently manages to load Windows faster than my PC, despite having a slower CPU and hard drive, so I wasn't sure if maybe AHCI was helping it along. By loading Windows, I mean the initial boot up until the Windows login screen; after that the differences are whatever I have set to auto-startup.

So, it's been a few years; last time I checked about this stuff was back in 2006-2007 and AHCI was pretty useless. Is it any more useful now, and should I bother? If I install the drivers and still use IDE mode, does it hurt anything?

Thanks in advance.

 

[ihyagp]

AHCI - yes. Shouldn't be any problems getting at your data. The only problems caused by AHCI are just XP not having a driver for it. There's ways to add it after the fact, or use F6 during install to slip it in. But if you're starting from scratch there's hardly any reason to not use AHCI if your OS supports it. Lower CPU use, better responsiveness during routine use, less of a slowdown from fragmentation. AHCI is great.

 

[DarkRogue]

Thanks, I figured as much. However, wasn't the argument against it before that it would actually slow down the machine in non-server environments?
Is that somehow nullified now?

I didn't think switching to AHCI would affect my data drives, but I had to ask, so thanks for clarifying. I don't want the drives to suddenly freak out and kill all its data because it suddenly went from IDE to AHCI.

 

[Matt84]

Only trouble I had with AHCI is my SATA DVD drive will not detect as a RW drive. As a result I cannot burn anything with CDBurnerXP. For now I still stick to IDE mode.

 

[DarkRogue]

Is that an issue with the software or AHCI? I recall reading a lot about this issue, but some people seemed to indicate they got around it by using different software, or updating the AHCI drivers or something. I'm in the process of getting a USB flash drive up so I can run some test installations of XP in various configurations, but I'm not sure how I'm going to test the optical drive just yet..

 

[PepperBreath]

Do you have to use CDBurnerXP? There's ImgBurn which is free and works with my AHCI drive.

 

[0roo0roo]

Originally posted by: SpeedKing
Only trouble I had with AHCI is my SATA DVD drive will not detect as a RW drive. As a result I cannot burn anything with CDBurnerXP. For now I still stick to IDE mode.

theres a hotfix for sata optical drive issues, butits for not detecting at all. not sure if it sorta applies anyways.