Win 10, SSDs and AHCI mode

[Timmah!]

Hello there,

i seek an advice regarding Win 10 and AHCI mode.

I have about 5 years old computer, which was equipped with Win 7 64x and Intel SSD disks from the very beginning. Yesterday, i finally decided to upgrade it to Win 10 Pro. As i was messing around with some apps post-upgrade, controlling if everything works as before, trying to do bit of an order in file structure etc..., i installed the latest version of Intel SSD Toolbox.

Now to my surprise i found out, my SSD disks (one used as primary bootable disc with Win installation - Intel X25M G2 80GB) and the other one used for games (Intel 310 240GB) - both run in IDE storage controller mode. This is kinda weird, cause i specifically remember, back in 2010, when i put this computer together and SSDs were still kinda novelty, i did my research beforehand and i did set the BIOS to AHCI, so everything was as it should be. Not really sure, what happened since then, whether it switched to IDE on its own at some point (most likely it did happen when i messed around with CPU overclocking and at some point loaded optimized defaults, not realizing the CPU voltages and clocks are not the only changes i did to BIOS...) or maybe it switched with this Win10 upgrade... i would not know and its basically irrelevant.

All i want now is get back to AHCI. So i googled on how to do it, and found this:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2795928/switch-ide-ahci-windows.html

followed it, but sadly it does not work for me. I did the needed REGEDIT, then went to BIOS, changed the ICH mode to AHCI, rebooted...and cant get to Win, cause its says boot drive is inaccesible....

What am i suppose to do now? Is there any way to fix this? There are some additional mentions on that Toms Hardware link about Windows reinstall being the best bet to make it work, but obviously i have no installation disk of Win10 to do it.

Thanks in advance for your response

 

[VirtualLarry]

I would make a bootable USB with the Win10 Pro installer on it, and re-install with AHCI mode set in BIOS. You can download using the "Media Creation Tool" from Microsoft, for free.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

The sites of advice and fixes for this should still be found on the web.

There is a pair of registry entries requiring deliberate progress through four or five mouse-clicks. There is/are MS "Fixit" tool(s) which will make the conversion.

The conversion requires you to reboot the system and change your storage mode configuration appropriate to the relevant drives.

I think there was a guide or article about:

IDE to RAID
IDE to AHCI
AHCI to RAID
RAID to AHCI

I've had to do this maybe two or three times. I'd rather sacrifice a little performance for simplicity and hardware independence, or use RAID with a separate controller in a mix of AHCI and RAID storage volumes. That is my approach for both my "home" server(s) and my workstations. I use the native MS MSAHCI controller driver instead of Intel's, and I pool my server drives so I can selectively duplicate folders.

 

[tcsenter]

This is the correct method/procedure for Windows 8 ~ 10:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2751461

 

[Timmah!]

Thanks to all of you for your help.

I googled a little bit more right after writing this topic and found another 2 tutorials on what to do, apparently there was a need to change more values in registry than just one - and then change AHCI in BIOS while havinh Windows set to booting to Safe Mode. Bottom line, i followed those and i succeeded, now rolling with AHCI and AS SSD benchmark reports 2x as high benchmark scores than before....although to be honest in reality, i dont feel much difference. System seems to take about the same time to boot IMO, the apps dont seem to open faster, at least not significantly enough for me to notice.... but this is 5 years old computer, so i will just stick to being satisfied it works properly and in the manner its supposed to.

Now onto adding one or better 2 GTX1080s

 

[tcsenter]

Also check the AHCI driver installed for Intel SATA controller. Sometimes Windows Update doesn't offer the latest from Intel. The latest version depends on the Intel chipset you said the system is five years old so that could encompass 4, 5, 6 Series chipsets.

 

[Ketchup]

Glad you worked it out. If the BIOS didn't come originally set to AHCI, one BIOS reset and it would be easy to overlook this one option. As you found, Windows knows how to manually "fix" this change, so I never understood why people were so hopped up on changing this and that in the registry.

Good to see the numbers go up. As you said, not a big difference to feel. We have talked about this before (I think it was a thread from VL), and the added features are nice, but a lot of times there isn't a real world speed improvement to be had (depending on the drive and the controller, of course).

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Glad you worked it out. If the BIOS didn't come originally set to AHCI, one BIOS reset and it would be easy to overlook this one option. As you found, Windows knows how to manually "fix" this change, so I never understood why people were so hopped up on changing this and that in the registry.

Good to see the numbers go up. As you said, not a big difference to feel. We have talked about this before (I think it was a thread from VL), and the added features are nice, but a lot of times there isn't a real world speed improvement to be had (depending on the drive and the controller, of course).

Well, I read somewhere that the difference between PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0 showed up in twice the throughput with 2.0 for add-in storage controllers. You could put a good controller in a PCI_E slot and feel "let down."

That's what my imperfect memory recalls, anyway.