I'm using a Maximus Formula board and Vista Business 64-bit SP1 with AHCI currently disabled in the BIOS...should I enable AHCI for better performance?...I'm hearing conflicting info on whether or not it should be enabled or not...I mostly use my system for hard core gaming in a home/non server environment...I also have 1 SATA DVD drive and 1 IDE DVD drive in the system along with a SATA hard drive
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AHCI- enable or disable?
- Thread starter polonyc2
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yes, it will put less stress on the hard drives, extending its life. particularly useful with like virus scanning and torrents in the background on the same drive while doing other things, which will allow it to perform better and last longer.
there will be a arguably noticible or not noticible decrease in normal performance due to overhead. i sure as hell don't notice or care if my game takes 10 seconds longer to load, if it accesses it during the game then get more ram!
i use it on XP (non fresh install, not as hard to switch without reformating as i thought it was)
there will be a arguably noticible or not noticible decrease in normal performance due to overhead. i sure as hell don't notice or care if my game takes 10 seconds longer to load, if it accesses it during the game then get more ram!
i use it on XP (non fresh install, not as hard to switch without reformating as i thought it was)
a noticable decrease in normal performance?...then isn't that a huge negative to enabling it?
even if the benefits are not much is there any huge negative to enabling it?
You'll get better benefits by enabling "Write Cache" on your hdds than ACHI but its recommend to have a UPS to do that.
I said arguable. I don't notice a difference, but then again I don't time how long my games take to load or how long it takes to extract the same file. I often extract big files while doing other things, so i don't really care how long it takes, i just care that it doesn't cause stress to the HD.
Gorankar
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AHCI is handy if you use e-sata drives or think you might down the line. I have several and hot plugging them is a lot more convenient than rebooting every time I plug a different one in. In the situation you describe, it does not seem as though it would benefit you much though.
Switching to AHCI on a current install will BSOD you at boot. There are ways around that for both Vista and Xp though.
Switching to AHCI on a current install will BSOD you at boot. There are ways around that for both Vista and Xp though.
kirbyrj
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I switched over just for eSATA. I tried a guide on google to switch over, but ended up having to do a repair install with a slipstreamed XP disc with the ICH10R driver on it. Wasted a night, but got it working.
I don't mind doing a re-install of the OS to enable it...I frequently reformat my drive so that isn't a problem for me...I was just wondering if enabling it would be worth it, performance wise...or if there were any huge negatives to enabling it...even if the performance improvements were very small, to me it would be worth it as long as there was no negative side effects
I read a lot of horror stories from people who enabled it using XP so that scared me off a bit
kirbyrj
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From the real world side of things. I haven't noticed one difference going from IDE to AHCI mode. Works fine in XP other than a random BSOD for the iastor.sys driver (Intel AHCI) once every two or three weeks, but from what I understand that's uncommon and probably just a bad driver revision (wait for new one I guess).
Gorankar
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No huge negatives on a clean install of Vista or Xp (provided you have the F6 drivers for Xp that is). But there is no noticeable real world performance gains or losses by using it in the situation you described either. I enable it, because I use external e-sata drives, if I did not, I prolly would not have it enabled.
why wouldn't you enable it if you didn't have external e-sata drives?...if there is no difference in performance either way then why not just enable it?...plus I've read that enabling it puts less stress on the hard drive along with less heat and noise which could make the drive last longer
kirbyrj
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It used to be easier to install with WinXP specifically because you didn't need to slipstream an install CD with drivers or have a floppy around. I've never had one of my personal hard drives fail on me so the "advantage" of having the drive last longer isn't really worth the effort of digging out a floppy drive to install WinXP. Just lazy I guess.
Basically, the advantage of a longer lasting drive isn't really an advantage at all if the drive lives long enough to become obsolete.
Gorankar
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I am not personally concerned about those things. I seldom keep a drive in an active system past 2 years. I have never noticed more noise or higher case temps because I had it off. Not having to hassle with F6 floppies, being able to use my older versions of Drive Image that can't see drives under ahci. There are a number of reasons not to bother with it depending on ones situation.
But, really, it is a moot point anyway. I gotta have hot swap capability, so I use it.
I use it (except on the ATi 690 and 780 chipsets where it is bugged).
It allows the drive to work better in multi-access situations (boot up, virus scan, etc etc) where more than one program wants to access the drive as it can shuffle and queue access requests so that the heads can get the data in the quickest path and not just randomly as the requests come in, its also allows hot swap.
It allows the drive to work better in multi-access situations (boot up, virus scan, etc etc) where more than one program wants to access the drive as it can shuffle and queue access requests so that the heads can get the data in the quickest path and not just randomly as the requests come in, its also allows hot swap.
Gorankar
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AHCI is just an interface standard. Read about it on wikipedia or the MS knowledge base. It has it's benefits and drawbacks like anything else does, but you will not notice them while gaming. Your frame rate will not go up or down, AHCI does not cause any modern games to crash that I have heard of, and the time it takes to load levels will not change up or down any appreciable amount either.
Since you are using Vista and have a recent Intel chip set, enabling it on a fresh install should be smooth sailing for you. Just don't be surprised when you can't tell any difference with it being enabled.
Wrong way for Vista. Switching to AHCI on vista just prompts a new device found message as the OS finds the stuff on the controller. Including the OS drive itself. It's AHCI back to IDE mode that gets you BSOD. Tried this on my V64 business.
Gorankar
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Is that new since Sp1? When I installed Vista pre Sp1 in eide mode and then tried to enable AHCI, I got a stop error. I found a MS knowledge base article that showed me how to resolve it with a registry edit. Don't know about going the other way since I have never tried
I've enabled it on my last 3 systems with no issues playing music or games, of course YMMV.
the way I did it was force update drive for the SATA driver with the ICH10R driver, when it was disabled in bios. On the reboot I enabled it in BIOS and everything worked smoothly, took about 2 minutes on XP.
Oh I forgot about hotplugging, I think its dumb how eSATA and SATA use different cables, I have a usb hd external enclosure that has a SATA port and I use it like eSATA with AHCI hot plugging.
kirbyrj
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That's what I did, but for some reason when I tried to update the driver, it didn't work right, so when I rebooted, it blue screened in both IDE and AHCI mode. Those were the same directions I used though. I thought it would work, but I guess I was just unlucky. No worries. Here I am in AHCI mode.
I use an external enclosure for media files. It's a Vantec with eSATA, so I just wanted to be able to turn it on and have it detected in the system. That works fine. Only problem is it doesn't show up in the remove hardware wizard, so I can't turn it off without shutting the computer off (well, I can, but I don't want to
).I reformatted my Vista 64 system tonight enabling AHCI...is NCQ enabled by default now or do I have to do something to enable it?...I remember with one of my older hard drives from a year or 2 back there was an option in 'Device Manager' under my Hard Drive to enable NCQ but I don't see that now