I have always wondered about this, I have the option to set my Sata HDD (Samsung F3) to Ide, Raid or AHCI Raid. I have tried it with both IDE and AHCI but not set it to raid as its only a single drive bnut then again the AHCI mode is classed as raid as well so I'm confused. It works under both IDE and AHCI modes but is their any difference in performance or reliability. Thanks I am using a MSI 790FX GD70 motherboard.
IDE runs the disk in parallel IDE (as in pre-SATA) compatibility mode. This is generally only recommended if there are reasons to do so (older OS etc.). RAID lets you combine several disks in various modes, none of which I can personally recommend. AHCI is the mode I'd recommend, even if it says AHCI RAID, as it allows for a potential speed increase using NCQ (native command queuing, the disk can decide in which order to process requests and thus optimize them).
Yeh thats pretty much what I thought but was looking for confirmation. I used to use raid 0 first with two seagates and then with two F1's so I'm familiar with raid and may go that route again adding another F3.
The reason I'm not so hot on RAID0 is that one unrecoverable error on one of the drives means complete loss of all data. That's just more data than I'm willing to lose for the relatively small increase in speed.
Thats partly the reason I gave up with raid 0, plus I built my new pc and gave my old one to the missus and needed a drive for it so I had to give up one of F1's. I'll probably give raid 0 a miss and save up for a decent SSD. I set my F3 to AHCI and installed win 7 early today before I posted so I'm glad I chose the right one.
Hi! Sorry for stealing the thread but i have a problem relating to this topic. I have noticed that my hdd's are running kinda slow when writing (about 60MB/s on the F3), I did some tests and it was indeed slower than it would be so i started googling and found this thread where you came to the conclusion that sata hard drives should be set to AHCI. I started BIOS and find out that my sata drives was set to the older IDE setting, I then tried changing the setting to AHCI but when i did that I had problem starting windows 7 because I just got a fast blue screen and then it rebooted. I'm now using my computer with the IDE setting but I would like to find a solution to my problem so that my hdd's gets faster. I dont know if this info helps but I have three harddrives: 1 Seagate 7200.12 320gb with windows on 1 Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 1 Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB and they are connected to a ASUS P6T SE motherboard Please help this Swede getting his harddrives faster /OTO
Mine still isn't behaving as expected. If you change to AHCI you need to re-install windows as far as I know because windows needs to install AHCI drivers that are used during boot.
well that sucks :/ I havent planned to formate and reinstall widnows for a while so I'll think i keep the settings as they are for now.
I was hoping someone would come up with a quick fix for the AHCI issue as I decided to revert back to IDE mode to see if my performance issues were better that way but alas not. I have just tried that reg fix and it did indeed work so thanks for that, just gotta decide what to do about this drive now.
Your hard drives will slow down over time because of the weight of the data written to them. You have to open them up and put a faster motor in or overvolt the existing one. Or.. they slow down in benchmark tests because when run they aren't just accessing blank space anymore. It's particularly noticeable if you benchmark the OS partition as the OS will be accessing it while being benchmarked.
Thanks for the help! It worked perfectly and my harddrives are now faster as you can see on the picture below
Well my run of HD Tune Pro 4.01 is still pretty erratic on AHCI ....But my run of ATTO is interesting as upto 4.0 your speeds are higher but then my drives scores sky rocket compared to yours which is interesting.
The difference for me between AHCI and IDE is also pretty negligible. I've lost about 20MB/s burst speed on one drive though according to HD Tach.
