Does Disabling AHCI hurt performance?

Ok, so I'm not sure if it differs for notebooks or not, or if it will mess with performance or anything.


If I disable AHCI to install Windows XP will it lower the performance of my SATA 5,400rpm drive? I have it enabled on my desktop, but my install for that is Windows Pro SP2, while it's for my laptop the only other Windows I have is just plain old XP, no service packs or anything.

So yeah, will it make a difference if I disabled AHCI?

 

Hmm yes there would be some performance difference visible if you turned off AHCI.... But one thing you should be careful while playing with AHCI is that if you install XP without AHCI and later wanna enable AHCI - first you should install the correct AHCI drivers in XP and while restarting alone you should turn on AHCI.... With AHCI on if you have the wrong driver installed for either your XP or Vista you would risk losing all data on your drive....

 

I don't think you will notice a huge performance difference either way. The main things that AHCI provide is the ability to 'hot-swap' the drives while the machine is running (nothing to do with performance) and Naive Command Queuing, which slightly increases performance under certain situations. If you have the SATA XP driver for the machine why not just use it? If AHCI is causing trouble for you then I don't think it will be missed if you disabled it.

 

Is the driver specific to the version of Windows XP you are using, or to the HDD? I've never had to worry about AHCI before so I'm sort of at a loss for it.


Well it sounds like I can install XP with it disabled, and then install a driver and turn it back on. So that would work for me, even if I don't know what driver I need right now.


I just disabled it and went ahead with installing it. I can't see any performance lost, and in most cases I seem to have gained performance going from Vista to XP, so who knows.

 

use *cough*linux*cough*

seriously why do people bother with going through this crap, having even paid for it?

Also, I think vista supports this ahci stuff, doesn't it? So why not use that instead. It's not that expensive I suppose, and maybe you can trade in your original XP copy and get a bargain off of that?

 

You could be lucky that you are able to change your SATA-Settings ... my HEL80 BIOS hides these setting ... or i'm blind?

 

your HEL80 doesn't support AHCI afaik.

 

Not exactly
The chipset supports the various SATA-Modes, but compal has locked those settings in the BIOS or they don't have implemented all chipset features