AHCI Slower to boot windows 7 than IDE?

[P910607]

Hi, today i secure erased my SSD which was set to IDE, and re-installed windows 7 on the new AHCI setting instead.

Now windows takes x2 (twice) as long to BOOT up, with the circle going round and round and round for about 30 seconds (instead of the previous 8-10 seconds in IDE..

Is this normal, or has something gone wrong during install?

Can anyone help?

(GIGABYTE Z77 DS3H, intel i.5 3470 3.2, 8GB 1600 RAM)

Tom

 

[Maxx_Power]

Hi, today i secure erased my SSD which was set to IDE, and re-installed windows 7 on the new AHCI setting instead.

Now windows takes x2 (twice) as long to BOOT up, with the circle going round and round and round for about 30 seconds (instead of the previous 8-10 seconds in IDE..

Is this normal, or has something gone wrong during install?

Can anyone help?

(GIGABYTE Z77 DS3H, intel i.5 3470 3.2, 8GB 1600 RAM)

Tom

I suspect you are not having a delay in the BIOS POST due to the AHCI controller initializing and looking for HDDs (usually the AHCi has an additional ROM to POST and look for drives, and this can add time, not like this on all boards though).

Then check to see that you used one of the faster (SATA III) ports that is differently coloured from the rest (for booting, see manual).

Those are the most obvious things I can think of. Beyond this, you can try updating Intel Chipset drivers.

Less Obvious Things:
If your SSD is already used, then it will not be as fast as a new SSD. This is true for all SSDs because SSDs preserve life span by delaying deletes until writes actually occur. TRIM makes this effect less, but as you'll see on most review sites, the initial speed of SSDs when it is infact completely empty is faster than used SSD speeds due to this reason. Forcing SSDs to always delete blocks (write zeroes to them) decreases NAND life, and that's why this is different from HDDs.