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    AHCI...Why use it?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by man00, Nov 13, 2010.

  1. man00

    man00 Notebook Geek

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    I tried it on Windows 7 and didn't see any increase in speed or any other advantage. In XP and Vista I saw disk speed performance hits...Maybe I didn't didn't do something right, I used the MS driver which from what I read is better than the Intel
     
    man00, Nov 13, 2010
    #1
  2. tilleroftheearth

    tilleroftheearth Wisdom listens quietly...

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    You read wrong.

    Try the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) driver v10.0.0.1046 instead.

    (As long as driver supports your chipset).
     
    tilleroftheearth, Nov 13, 2010
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  3. Tsunade_Hime

    Tsunade_Hime such bacon. wow

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    Better for SSD usage.
     
    Tsunade_Hime, Nov 13, 2010
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  4. chimpanzee

    chimpanzee Notebook Virtuoso

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    the key advantage of AHCI is NCQ that helps in multitasking situation(when HDD is heavily bang by different processes).

    In addition, I am not sure if standard IDE driver can handle SATA2. This is not an issue for HDD as very few of them can exceed UDMA/133 bandwidth(not sure about Momentus XT though).
     
    chimpanzee, Nov 13, 2010
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  5. HTWingNut

    HTWingNut Potato

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    IDE can handle SATA2 just fine. At least in my desktop I run in IDE mode because the AHCI is a bit flakey. I still exceed the SATA1 speeds no problem with an OCZ Vertex 2.
     
    HTWingNut, Nov 13, 2010
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  6. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

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    1) Make sure you use the Intel driver.

    2) The advantage of ACHI is support for Native Command Queuing (NCQ), where the disk controller queues a bunch of I/O requests and re-orders them to optimize the way your drive retrieves that data. You'll see marginal benefits on mechanical hard disks, because the mechanical hard disks are limited by high seek times and low IOPS ratings. NCQ does not scale well on mechanical hard drives.

    However, a good SSD will absolutely soar with NCQ. An SSD retrieving 16 I/O requests at once is significantly faster than if it were to retrieve those I/O requests one at a time.
     
    kent1146, Nov 14, 2010
    #6