AHCI and IDE

Hello,

I'm going to put two SSD and one HDD into a desktop. They should arrive from NewEgg today. I know the SSD's need to be AHCI, but looking in the bios I see I can set SATA channels 1 - 4 as AHCI but still have the option of setting 5 & 6 as IDE.

Is it best to put the HDD on IDE or can I put it on a AHCI channel with no negative outcome?

I plan to set channels 5 & 6 as IDE for the CD/DVD player but there is an extra channel for the HDD. The harddrive is a Hitachi HDS5C3020A and the CD player is a H L GSA-H60L 16x DVD RW DL SATA.

Thanks...

Set all hard drives ahci

Samuria said:

Set all hard drives ahci

What about the CD/DVD player, will it hurt if it's on one of the ports also?

Or should I stick with the original plan of putting it on 5/6 with it set IDE?

They can be set to ahci but there isnt much gain on dvds

There is pretty much no reason to use IDE mode these days - modern chipsets don't even offer it anymore. IDE mode is there for legacy OS support.

Well, turns out I have a 10 years old motherboard in my desktop and what a fiasco this was. The board has a BIOS and not UEFI.

The system wouldn't see the USB drive when formatted GPT so I had to reformat it with MBR.
Then the system wouldn't see the USB drive with AHCI on. It took me a while to figure out I had to turn AHCI off in order to get it to boot for the install...

So, I turned AHCI off until I formatted my new C drive and let the install copy over the files. As it rebooted, I went into the BIOS and turned AHCI back on hoping that it would set the drives up as AHCI. However, because the BIOS wouldn't see the drives with AHCI on (it kept booting to the USB), I had to enter the boot menu each time it rebooted and manually select my new C drive. Once I was able to remove the USB drive it was then able to boot directly to the C drive with no intervention on my part.

Also, it kept putting a 549MB system partition on one of my other drives so I had to disconnect the other two drives until that first reboot after it copied over the files. Took me a while to come up with that solution.

How do I know looking in Win10 if the drive are using AHCI or not? I know I'm not using GPT partitions and Windows 10 can't see all of my 3TB as one drive, it sees 2tb then the rest of the drive. I'm just wondering if I have a reason to leave AHCI on in the BIOS, because if Win10 isn't using it on the drives then I might as well turn it off...

There is pretty much no reason to use IDE mode these days - modern chipsets don't even offer it anymore. IDE mode is there for legacy OS support.

I must of forgot to mention I have a 10 years old motherboard.

If you open the drive properties in Device Manager->Disk Drives and go to the Details tab, the Device instance path should say "IDE" for IDE mode and "SCSI" for an AHCI controller.

Soapm said:

How do I know looking in Win10 if the drive are using AHCI or not? I know I'm not using GPT partitions and Windows 10 can't see all of my 3TB as one drive, it sees 2tb then the rest of the drive. I'm just wondering if I have a reason to leave AHCI on in the BIOS, because if Win10 isn't using it on the drives then I might as well turn it off...



I must of forgot to mention I have a 10 years old motherboard.

Is the 3TB drive your boot drive or a data drive? If it is just a data drive, it can be partitioned GPT as Windows has the driver to use GPT.

As far as AHCI v. IDE, look in device manager:

Device manager....

Thanks, it wouldn't let me delete the mbr partition to add GPT so I put the old 2TB drive back in and let it go at that.

Thanks...

Oh, and on the AHCI, I can see I have the entry you show, anyway to tell which drives are using that driver?

Soapm said:

Thanks, it wouldn't let me delete the mbr partition to add GPT so I put the old 2TB drive back in and let it go at that.

Thanks...

Oh, and on the AHCI, I can see I have the entry you show, anyway to tell which drives are using that driver?

Right click. Properties. Details tab. Scroll down to children in the property dropdown box.