ACHI vs. RAID vs. IDE in bios

[burrellbuzzman]

Hello,

I am running a ep45 ud3p motherboard and have installed windows 7 64bit and noticed that in my bios, the hard drive is being ran in IDE. When changing the settings to ACHI or RAID windows wouldn't boot and i think this is because in order to use these modes i would have had to enable one of them and then install windows back on to the hdd.

Reinstalling windows on my hdd isn't a problem, however i just wondered if i would see any benefit in performance? i currently have a single 500GB drive which is a seagate barracuda 7200.12. obviously this wouldnt be installed in a RAID array, so would i benefit from enabling Raid in the bios? if not would ACHI be a better option for a single hdd?

Although i realise that the windows experience index is not the most accurate of benchmarking tools currently in IDE my hdd is at 5.9, if using either RAID or ACHI would this be a higher number?

Thanks rob

 

[sub mesa]

Don't use the windows performance thingy; if i remember correctly it won't show you higher than 5.9 unless you got an SSD. Its not like you can reduce performance to a single number. Try the HDTune Pro Random Access test - that's an already much better performance benchmark.

You need AHCI to use NCQ, which is especially important for SSDs but less so for HDDs. If you only have HDDs you can leave things as is.

You need to set some registry value if you want to change your boot drive from IDE-emulation to AHCI instead. In your case, it gives you NCQ and hot-plug support.

 

[burrellbuzzman]

Brilliant thank you,

So if i am using IDE emulation at the moment, is my hard drive performing to it's full potential, as in SATA 3gb/s?

thanks again for the advice

 

[sminlal]

sub mesa is right in that you're pretty unlikely to see any difference if you were to switch to AHCI move. But it's not all that terribly difficult if you want to do it anyway, just follow these steps:

1) Run the Registry Editor (regedit.exe)
2) Navigate to Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
3) Set the "Start" value to 0 (zero)
4) Navigate to Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Pciide
5) Set the "Start" value to 0 (zero)
6) Shut down
7) Start up again, but before Windows boots go into the BIOS configuration screens and change the disk mode to "AHCI". Save the new BIOS configuration and restart so that Windows boots.

When Windows starts, it will detect the change, load the AHCI disk drivers, and do one more reboot to start up with them.

 

[burrellbuzzman]

hey, brilliant thanks. do i need to install any drivers?

on gigabytes website they have a raid driver but i think it is actually intel, they also list an intel driver and when i searched for it on their site i came up with this

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&ProductID=2261&DwnldID=17882&lang=eng

but it says that out of date, so if i do need to install a driver manually i presume it is this one?

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=18859&ProdId=2101&lang=eng

Also, when i start up computer after the post screen i get information about the achi driver being loaded? kind of looks like an addition to the POST screen is this normal after each reboot?

Thanks rob

 

[sminlal]

I'm not familiar with the Gigibyte motherboard and BIOS but if it uses the Intel ICH10R chipset then the drivers are included in Windows 7.

 

[burrellbuzzman]

yeah i got my motherboard manual out and have fried my brain looking at all the raid combos +it was the one you said thanks