SeaWulf

Please bear with me since I am a novice.

Last October I assembled the system andit is rock solid. All I have had to do is to increase the voltage on the ram to 1.58v plus disable spread spectrum.

I have three Western Digital Black HDDS SATA II, the OS is on the 320 and I have two 750 drives(which I was going to put in RAID on SATA 7 and 8 but my Sapphire toxic card is too long and even with right angle cables it was going to be crimped cables so I passed on RAID)

My windows experience is 5.6 and is due to the OS HDD rating. Every other component was 5.8-5.9. So I starting questioning the O/S HDD.
I have found that in the On Chip ATA Device section in the BIOS the settings are PCI IDE BusMaster Disable, On Chip ATA Controller Enabled, SATA Mode IDE


So are my HDDS not really SATA II but IDE transfer rate? PC Wizard shows the HDDs as ATA. How do I check?

Is this the correct setting? Seems not.......and if I change to AHCI I know on reboot the startup will not recognize my drives.

Does the change effect my DVD drives which are IDE?

What do I need to do? Sorry for the long email but wanted to be complete.

thanks in advance

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Double Secret Probation
Additional system information
Titanium X FI PCIE
2 LG H55L DVD+RW (IDE)

Partizan

You should run in AHCI mode (it's faster and supports NCQ), but you'll probably have to reformat the drives and reinstall Vista.

I guess you can try without Vista reinstall: install the AHCI drivers first, reboot and set it to AHCI in bios. But it's usually too much hassle.

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Asmoday

This is how I did it in Vista:

1. Close all Windows applications.
2. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search, and then press ENTER.
3. If the dialog box User Account Control, click Continue.
4. Locate the registry subkey and then click the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ System \ CurrentControlSet \ Services \ Msahci
5. In the right panel, right-click on Start in the Name column, then click Edit.
6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
7. On the File menu, click Exit to quit the Registry Editor.

Reboot and enable AHCI in the bios.

It has caused no issues for me, but REMEMBER if you try this it is on your own risk, I can't be held responsible if anything goes wrong...

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scurvy

was this when u first installed vista or were u switching from IDE mode to AHCI on a later date?

Asmoday

I switched from IDE to AHCI a couple of month after my initial install..

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scurvy

did u see much of a performance increase??

Asmoday

Tbh, don't expect any groundbreaking increases in performance...in some instances there is a difference but not all that much.

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mike2h

in real world use you will probably not notice much if any improvement. some benchmarks will probably show some gain. then again most of the time we are just looking for combinations of incremental performance boosts t oget our overall speed up.
fyi ncq will have no benefit for you unless you are running a server or running your computer with similar demands. wich menas if you are just using your comp to game, browse the internet, some av use, etc. u will get no gain from ncq.

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scurvy

so how did the OP fare? wondering if he followed Asmoday's instructions and got it working in ahci????

mkk

This method also worked for me in Windows 7. The built in generic SATA AHCI boot driver gets activated and after that one can install Intels(or whichever makers) own driver.

No real gain, but also no pain. Other than three reboots that is

scurvy

alright I got the generic AHCI driver activated and running, now can i leave it at that or do I have to install Intel driver as well?/

scurvy

Everythings running perfect with AHCI. I installed the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver from the Intel site and not the one from my mobo's site.

In HD tach the burst speed has gone down, but access time and average read are slightly better.