The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    ATA vs. AHCI performance

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Atriya, Dec 22, 2008.

  1. Atriya

    Atriya Notebook Geek

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    77
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    I've got a Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop (purchased after an extended discussion on this forum). It has a SATA hard drive that can be set to either ATA (compatibility) or AHCI (native) mode in the (A09) BIOS. I use Windows Vista x86 and can get it working in either mode.

    However, I'm having problems with the Intel Matrix Storage Manager drivers (tried both the Dell 7.0 drivers and the latest 8.6 ones) in AHCI mode; my HDD stalls with the light on every 5-10 minutes for about 30-45 secs and I get the "Device\Ide\iaStor0 did not respond" error in the Windows Event Log. In spite of intensive Googling, I've been unable to find a solution to this problem. I thus have 3 choices:

    1) Use the drive in ATA mode (no problems).
    2) Use the drive in AHCI mode without Intel drivers (no problems).
    3) Use the drive in AHCI mode with Intel drivers (problems need solving).

    What do you folks suggest? In particular, are there any tangible benefits in using AHCI mode? I've read about features like NCQ (native command queuing) and flash cache module, but do they provide any real performance increase? Also, are these features used if I use AHCI mode without the Intel drivers? As an aside, I've noticed a slight increase in boot time when using AHCI mode. However, my Vista HDD performance index goes up 4 points (!) in AHCI mode.

    Getting the best performance possible is important to me. Apart from web-surfing and audio/video playback, I use the laptop for playing (heavy) games.
     
    Atriya, Dec 22, 2008
    #1
  2. Andy

    Andy Notebook Prophet

    Reputations:
    2,133
    Messages:
    6,399
    Likes Received:
    1
    Trophy Points:
    206
    AHCI will only help when running multiple intensive tasks (due to NCQ). It also improves power consumption slightly due to LPC. For these features, to be activated you need Intel MSM installed.

    If MSM is not installed, only the SATA2 bandwidth is available and not the features.

    With ATA enable, max bandwidth will be about ATA/100 or ATA/133, but for a HDD thats fine. And NCQ doesn't really improve performance alot, so if it remains disabled, its not going to make much of a difference.

    (Don't bother comparing WEI scores)
     
    Andy, Dec 22, 2008
    #2