AHCI vs regular Native IDE

fredc said:

Now i stick to the saying "if your PC is functioning well don't mess with the drivers" , only update if your having issues.

That is exactly what keeps me happy with IDE and no AHCI. I burned my fingers with Win 7 destroyed within seconds!

fredc said:

I gave up on that , Asus makes my motherboard and they have had only one choice available for years , the ACHI driver is from around 2010 if i can recall .

Thats why i went to a specialty forum and asked for assistance with my ACHI driver , there was much more recent versions but surprisingly to me the newest ones made no difference in my systems performance .

Now i stick to the saying "if your PC is functioning well don't mess with the drivers" , only update if your having issues.

I'm not doing any of this on my main build. I did find the correct download at Gigabyte's support site for both model boards here easy enough by mostly for the 64bit 7 while the front page shows Windows 10 supported?! In order words Windows 10 during the installation is able to look up and download the drivers needed while we get left out in the cold! 10 booted right up without notice while 7 BSODed for a split second each time!

And guess what? The driver download is actually a self extracting archive that creates a new folder on it's own to unpack the four files one being the "inf"ormation driver.

fredc said:

I just automatically thought chasing the latest drivers was the thing to do as i thought it would keep my computer in top shape but i was wrong lol.

Every time i tried newer drivers (even the correct ones according to people who know a lot more than me " i saw a decrease in performance or no difference in performance at all .

As long as the computers performing well i stay with it . For multiple SSD's configured in a "Raid", configuration having the latest drivers is important though from what i have read.

Here I had the two Sata 3 drives mounted as SCSI to follow one guide over at SF someone had posted back in 2010 when first getting this one assembled at the time and ordering all of the new drives with the S3s ordered separately. At first I had the now 10 drive as the storage/backup device until the pair of S3s came in.

Now one of those two sits in the second case as the second drive with the 7 restored to it while the other having access problems where I replaced the data cable and still saw hard times seems to be working well in the external usb enclosure. Still waiting to see when a USB 3.0 fan cooled enclosure comes out. I took the first WD Green Power 1tb drive I had first used besides the second OS drive out once the other pair came in. That was put back in once 10 was on finally and I had pulled the other two out. That will go back into the enclosure once I decide whether or not to get the second 2tb drive I ordered as the larger replacement I held off on getting until now since it presently sees over 1tb on it! Dual booting can do that!

fredc said:

Jesus man , how do you know all this sh_ _ lol, i'm confused as hell now.

That's from spending years trying out all kinds of things with the different versions of Windows. In fact when first trying out Windows 98SE along side "Literally" along side Windows 95 I custom installed 98 to the "Window98" folder on the 95 primary! Back then you were playing with Fat not NTFS where now the newer would automatically replace the older. The two ran together but you had to start the temp install of 98 from a dos prompt much like you did with 3.1 to see WIndows load. In dos you couldn't see "Windows98" as the Windows folder name due to the dos limitation on the length of file and folder names back then. And you still wouldn't run both together to start with but for a fast look at 98. Still missed 95 afterwards however when moving onto 98SE!

Back when 7 was sitll in beta and RC form I toyed with the old 3.1 floppies to try and get 3.1 to run on a VM and added in a floppy drive into the old Vista case. Unfortunately Floppy disk #1 one of the six 1.44mb disks had a problem from sitting around unused for a number of years! like over a decade! So I ended up trying out the DosBOX app to run some of those classic oldies from the dos days! That was something to see again!

logicearth said:

AHCI has nothing to do with the Drives (HDD or SSD) it has to do with the SATA controller and how it communicates with the host system.

Thanks once more, because I just read my motherboard manual and found that AHCI or RAID on Sata 5 or 6 will need third party drivers installed before it can actually work. I may have plugged in my SSD on Sata 5 or 6. So, I'm going to try to plugin the SSD in Sata 1 to 4 and see if it solves the problem.


Edit: My SSD with OS is connected to Sata 1 already. I installed Win 7 - downgraded from Win X to Win 7. While doing so, I switched to AHCI in bios before installing OS and things are just fine now.

Edit 2: When I used the process on the forum for converting IDE To AHCI in Win X, it broke the installation. Tried many things but in vain. Finally downgraded from X to 7.

On the board here I found that I had to see a floppy disk made up for the F6 option when going to install 7 in order to have the Windows installer install the necessary drivers while 10 seems to have them at least in generic form as 10 simply started up normally while I noticed the speed up of the post screens only however.

AHCI is a sata controller implementation. It does have advantages in that among other things supports hot swapping and native command queuing. It can be implemented without a reinstall by changing registry keys in windows 7 and 8. I am not sure about 10, but I would suspect if it worked in 8 it would work in 10. It is a newer implementation of transferring data than IDE, and tends to be more efficient. It has nothing to do with Intel or AMD. They both have their drivers for AHCI as does Microsoft.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...s-7-vista.html

Night Hawk, you only need the F6 drivers if you are installing to a raid array. If installing in AHCI, Windows has it's own implementation of AHCI drivers since Vista that work pretty well.

Well 7 is running into BSOD favorites and finding "device inaccessible" errors when gong to change the Native IDE to AHCI. As for both AMD and Intel you can be sure they sit together in conferences discussing how to keep standards going between the two and see to it that drivers are available. MS would be on their case in a hurry if not!

But going by what Gigabyte had at their support site was for a floppy disk type F6 option you would have previously seen at the time 7 was installed. As I recall I thought that was left behind years earlier with XP not 7?! And when looking through the Device Manager there isn't any Sata controller item even when showing all hidden devices to have browse for the drivers once those are unpacked. The support site offers both the RAID and AHCI downloads separately but with both needing the F6 option?!

I have to wonder about how to slipstream them into an installer of some type since both 64bit Ultimate on one build and Pro on the other both run into the fast and furious blue screen to simple message of not finding the bootable device being accessible. 10 of course is three versions newer and seeing the advantage of covering more hardware configurations as well as including a larger variety of generic drivers due to the now multiple platform OS we are looking at. In fact 10 never even noticed the change while 7 did!