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    Is "IDE primary" mode only option in Win XP pro?

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by King of Interns, Jan 12, 2009.

  1. King of Interns

    King of Interns Simply a laptop enthusiast

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    Looking around the forums I read that ACHI is better performing than IDE and that one can change between the 2 options in the bios. When entering my bios I have no option just "IDE primary" in bios and its greyed out so no options. Is this because I have XP pro and not vista or some other hardware/software related reason.
    Have to admit I otherwise no nothing about these two modes and what they exactly offer.

    Thanks for any help
     
    King of Interns, Jan 12, 2009
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  2. Andy

    Andy Notebook Prophet

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    BIOS has got nothing to do with the OS here. Try updating the BIOS, and see if a newer release has the option to toggle the HDD Mode from IDE to AHCI and vice versa.
     
    Andy, Jan 12, 2009
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  3. King of Interns

    King of Interns Simply a laptop enthusiast

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    I have latest 1002 bios version so I guess I am out of luck
     
    King of Interns, Jan 12, 2009
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  4. Andy

    Andy Notebook Prophet

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    AHCI won't offer much of a performance boost if your SSD is reading at about 130-140MB/s max.
     
    Andy, Jan 12, 2009
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  5. Big Mike

    Big Mike Notebook Deity

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    I thought most SSDs discouraged AHCI use as they didn't support NCQ which is the main "feature" of AHCI mode?
     
    Big Mike, Jan 12, 2009
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  6. Andy

    Andy Notebook Prophet

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    The main feature of AHCI is the SATA bandwidth. IDE is limited to ~133MB/s.

    NCQ is a feature supported by most SATA drives, and the drives that don't support NCQ, do not make use of it. On intel platforms, one has to install the matrix storage manager to take advantage of NCQ (if the drive supports it).

    JMicron controller had something to do with IDE, but don't know much about this.
     
    Andy, Jan 13, 2009
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  7. Big Mike

    Big Mike Notebook Deity

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    Are you sure that SATA2 in IDE compatibility mode is actually speed limited? AHCI is just supposed to enable NCQ and hot plug, disabling it removes those features and the controller pretends to be a standard IDE controller, but I don't think it actually limits the drive bandwidth to IDE standards (EG ata-133, there is also a faster ATA-166 also)

    Yeah, look at this:
    http://www.abchw.com/content/seagate-barracuda-7200.11-ide-vs-ahci-%26amp;-baracuda-es.2

    burst transfer is 246 mb/s in IDE mode, oddly its actually faster than AHCI, but clearly its not limited to 133 mb/s
     
    Big Mike, Jan 13, 2009
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  8. ViciousXUSMC

    ViciousXUSMC Master Viking NBR Reviewer

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    AHCI is over-rated just like Raid 0...

    Its made for servers, not consumer level machines.

    The main benefit is some of the server related functions/options. I would not expect to see any increase in speed. Also for XP you would need drivers for it to work in that mode.
     
    ViciousXUSMC, Jan 13, 2009
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  9. Andy

    Andy Notebook Prophet

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    The actual data transfer rate won't top 140-150MB/s when in ATA-133 mode, because the max data throughput is limited to 133MB/s. Intel controllers max out UDMA 6, after that its SATA 1.0

    The difference with AHCI/SATA-mode will be noticeable only when you're using a drive that actually reads and writes above 150-160MB/s. AHCI won't make a difference in performance for slower SSDs, and HDDs.
     
    Andy, Jan 13, 2009
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