I got a 256 GB SSD OCZ Agility 4, and using a 500GB hdd for storage on my computer in my sig. When i installed the SSD in the computer I changed the setting in the BIOS to AHCI and set up windows, then added my 500GB hdd for storage. I noticed recently that both drives are showing up in the box where your thumb drive would show up and you would eject it. If i have a thumb drive in the computer all three drives show up ejecta-able, or if only the two drives are there they still show up as eject-able. So does anyone have any idea why they are showing up there? Any help would be appreciated with this issue.
IIRC setting them to AHCI allows hot-swapping so you can, should you choose, 'eject' the drive and swap it over for another one. Even if i've understood it wrong it's nothing to concern yourself with, both my internal drive are set to AHCI and show up as removable in 'safely remove hardware'.
Thanks for the quick reply but I'm just curious why the OS drive would show up as removable? Unless I'm mistaken that would surly crash the OS. Other Thoughts?
Right, it's a feature/bug of the sata controller for hot swapping where it views all ports as it would an esata. If it bothers you you can set a registry flag so it won't show up anymore. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci \Controller0\Channel0 \Channel1 \Channel2 \Channel3 \Channel4 \Channel5 create dword TreatAsInternalPort with value of 1 for each channel/drive you don't want to show as removable.
Thank you both for your quick responses I just wanted to make sure that I didn't do anything wrong with the install.
Also, if you don't want to go about in the registry you could install latest irst drivers instead. They don't exhibit this 'feature'.
Yeah, I had to do this after installing my SSD. It wasn't particularly clear from Intel's website which version of the drivers to use, but in the end I installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager and all was good. There's also the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers, and to be honest I'm not clear what the difference is between this and IMSM
Modern SATA controllers and drives support hot swapping. For that to work, the controller must be set in AHCI mode and not a legacy emulation mode. Why would you want to disable it? I've used it for testing HDDs and SSDs without having to shut down my computer. It's a pretty useful feature to have.
install the latest Intel rapid storage technology Leave AHCI enabled. http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Sea...=Intel®+Rapid+Storage+Technology+(Intel®+RST)
No one said anything about disable ahci or hotswap, only to not show the OS drive as an option for it in safely remove list.
But you can't hotswap a drive safely without using the "safely remove hardware" feature. Write caching is enabled for SATA drives automatically, so writes can be in progress at any time even if you're not writing anything to the disk at the moment. You will lose data if you unplug the drive before all writes are done. Write caching is automatically disabled for USB drives, which is why you've probably never experienced any data loss.
I have.. only removable devices are in the system tray for hot swap. My system drives are not. This is since Windows 8.
Pretty sure that under Win 7, all AHCI drives show as removable by default (including the C: drive, which is a bit silly).
Who acutally swaps out thier OS drive while in operation? There is no reason for it to be in the safely remove list really, and selecting it accidentaly could be quite irritating as it unmounts it.
