SSD with no AHCI, is it worth it?

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Rustycarrot

Rustycarrot

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I have recently purchased an SSD, (Crucial BX100 250Gb). I put it in my pc (Dell Inspiron 620), and found that the bios with this pc does not support AHCI!? Will an SSD even be useful without AHCI. I know nothing about AHCI and why I would need it over IDE, so I am pretty confused on what no AHCI will do to the SSD.

I do want to be able to boot off of the SSD, if that affects anything.

I did update to the newest bios from Dell, and there is still no AHCI. Upon reading Dell forums, it is agreed that the bios does not support AHCI. I have also seen that it is possible to enable AHCI but I would have to hack the mobo, and I don't really want to do that!

Thanks for the help!
Rusty
 
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ingtar33
ahhh... without ACHI some features might not work right; many SSDs fail to reach advertised speeds in IDE mode. That said even handicapped like this your SSD will be a SIGNIFICANT improvement over the hard drive, with read/write speeds orders of magnitude faster.
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ingtar33

ingtar33

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ahhh... without ACHI some features might not work right; many SSDs fail to reach advertised speeds in IDE mode. That said even handicapped like this your SSD will be a SIGNIFICANT improvement over the hard drive, with read/write speeds orders of magnitude faster.
 
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Rustycarrot

Rustycarrot

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Thanks so much for the fast response!

I'm glad to hear that! I was getting pretty sick of my mechanical HDD! Maybe someday Dell will come out with an update! (fingers crossed)

Thanks again!
 
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MathandPhysics

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Just curious to know how things are going with the drive. I just bought the 500GB Samsung EVO 850 that went on sale. I too have the same computer and obviously the same issue. I would like to confirm that even running the SSD in IDE mode is significantly and ridiculously better than the HDD, especially when it comes to loading many small files (samples for my DAW). So, albeit much better performance from the swap to SSD, I'm still curious to see the performance improvement by enabling the AHCI mode. Like you, I don't want to hack the BIOS.

I found a discussion about this matter on another forum and they even have a hacked BIOS update for the Inspiron 620s model which apparently works for the non-"s" and Vostro systems as well but I'd like someone to confirm a successful update from that patch/hack to see if it's even worth it.

So far, I've had no issues with the new install of the SSD from just using Macrium to clone the old HDD onto the SSD. In fact, the process was quick and seamless. One minute I'm booting off the HDD and 30 minutes later I booting off the SSD. No noticeable difference visually in the boot sequence but the boot time was 75% less! Even loading samples is amazing. I don't even see the loading bar anymore for some samples like used to before.

It's all great but I still can't get the thought of the potential speed I could have just with a simple 30 second update and two registry entries. I have another system that has the same SSD and it has the AHCI option. In that system, I do get the maximum read and write speeds that one would expect. Up to 560MB/s while I'm getting about 225MB/s on the Inspiron. It's fine I guess. The files I'm dealing with are smaller files but still....

I guess, next time I'll keep away from Inspiron systems and just stick with the XPS systems (which is the one I referred to in comparison).
 
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Rustycarrot

Rustycarrot

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Hello!

The Crucial drive that I was dealing with did not work at all with my system. I couldn't even get the system to boot into Windows when it was using that drive as the boot drive. After speaking to Crucial support, they agreed that the drive would not work on my computer. I have since built a new pc, and was happy to get rid of that Inspiron.

I'm glad to here that you got yours to work though!
 
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Blackink

Blackink

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I installed a Samsung 850EVO 250GB SSD into my old Dell Inspiron 530 desktop PC 4 months ago. No ACHI in there either, even after a BIOS upgrade.

It runs better and faster than the standard Western Digital 500GB 7200RPM hard drive I had in it.

Now I also install Windows 7 Pro on the new SSD compared to Windows XP Pro that was on the old Western Digital HD so that probably contributes to some of the reasons it's performing better and faster.

 
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