SATA operation - ATA, AHCI, or IRRT for an X25M?

I just updated the firmware in my father's E6400 that is now packing a 160GB G2 drive from Intel. At first the drive would not update, so I went to the BIOS to try toggling the SATA operation options. I found it was on IRRT, and switching to ATA allowed it to update. I know there are some out there that have found performance advantages from having it on one of these settings, but I couldn't find much about IRRT.

Of my 3 options, which would be the best, or is there one to be avoided?

 

10char bump?

 

If you are on Windows 7 you might want to use AHCI and Microsoft drivers to have Trim.

 

with x-25m, m$ driver has a tiny bit better WEI as well as AS SSD marks plus TRIM but the latency is quite a bit worse than IRST, in the end, for the responsiveness, i can feel IRST driver is clearly better.

 

I was setup running IRRT with my Adata S596 128GB ssd but there is no way to confirm that trim is functioning, should I for sure be running AHCI for Trim or does that work with IRRT too?

 

There is a way to confirm TRIM is running. See this link: http://forums.legitreviews.com/about23670.html

 

Well Unfortunately this technique is actually not actually verify it is working, it just confirms that windows 7 is actually sending out the trim command. You can actually type this on a non SSD machine and it will come back active too.

What I was trying to confirm is that my drive is actually receiving the trim commands and is not getting filtered out because of some sort of weird SATA selection in bios. I wish you could almost do a sort of ping type command that would have the drive say "I received you trim command"

I really haven't got the write speeds I was expecting from this drive so I am concerned. What happens if I just change my SATA bios settings now (os already installed)?