Does driver really matter for HDD?

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jbrdbr111x

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Jan 8, 2009
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Was talking to a friend and he was saying that he never used the driver for his HDD rather one with a Windows only signature and saw no difference and I was wondering if it really makes a difference for the HDD as per the type of driver and can it really affect the performance?
 
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hubbardt

hubbardt

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I have never heard of the HDD driver affecting performance on home desktops/laptops.
The driver is written for the operating system not the manufacturer of the drive.

It makes good sense to use the drivers/software supplied with your motherboard but that isn't for HDD

Tell your friend ... No difference
 
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RetiredChief

RetiredChief

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Feb 22, 2007
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The default drivers supplied by microsoft are fine, that is no reperformance difference.
Tht said, thre are three modes, IDE, AHCI and Sata Raid. First two most common.
With IDE, absolutely do diff. driver = pcide, HOWEVER this should be in DMA mode and if the system downshifts to PIO mode then performance suffers.
AHCI:
.. Default driver is msahci
.. Chipset specif driver (ie for intel chipset) is iaSTor
.. Perfrmance wise I do NOT think you would tell the difference. However the Health reporting might be etter with the intel drive.
.. usig msahci vs iaSTor is only important if you switch from a HDD -> a SSD. iaSTor improves he performance of a Sata III SSD.

Hope this helps.

Added: hubbardt:
You are correct in that drivers are OS specific. However in the case of say windows7 on an intel platform and Bios set to AHCI during install, unless you do a custom install uSoft will load it's default driver (msahci). After OS install you can then opt to load the chipset specific driver from Intel (normally also provided on MB support page - I normally go straight to Intel or latest driver). Bottom line for a single HDD in ahci mode - will agree NO diff in performace, not true for a SSD though.
 
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