Dear LazyWeb: should I be running my 500GB SATA-II drive in IDE or AHCI mode?
FWIW, I installed with IDE. Found a registry setting that allows you to switch to AHCI mode after installing (HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\msachi\Start needs to be 0 for AHCI to be active, it seems) and I already tried that out… I still have my SATA DVD drive showing up there (some people lost theirs when they tried this) so that’s a non-issue.
My reason for asking is that I’ve read that AHCI mode is supposed to be better yet I think IDE mode was faster – or at least I’m seeing AHCI take longer on boot and then hiccup a little bit while booting…
Just curious…
I think the biggest thing you get with AHCI is the ability to hotswap the hard drive. That’s much more useful with, say, an eSATA drive or a drive that is not your primary system drive than for your system drive. And I think some optical drives have problems with AHCI mode, but then some motherboards let you set AHCI/IDE mode separately on each SATA connector.
Hm, thanks interesting.
The eSATA drive is controlled by a different controller (the J-something rather than the Intel ICH9 controller) so that shouldn’t be impacted. And the optical drive shows up fine so that’s OK.
My biggest concern is that of backup/restore stuff. I know that if I installed Windows with the drive set as AHCI I would have had to supply a drive during the install via a floppy disk: there’s no floppy disk in my PC :) I have a USB floppy drive but who knows if that’ll work. I guess if I had a HDD failure and had to restore it, I could pick up a floppy for exactly that purpose, but even so. If the only thing I get is hotswapping drives that are internal, maybe I’ll flip flop back to IDE and not have to worry about it.
Hey guys, I have a problem. I recently bought an Acer 5920G notebook, and like most ppl installing windows xp on a SATA drive i had a problem. I switched the SATA drive mode to IDE, and had no problem installing. Thing is, Im supposed to have a 320GB hard drive, and yet I only have a 150gb drive. When I was installing XP, 2 drives popped up, and I was asked which one to format in order to install xp on. Since then I have seen no sign whatsoever of the other 150gbs. So im interested: does this have anything to do with the fact that im running in IDE mode? and would switching to AHCI improve general performance of my computer? last slightly different question: I have Windows XP SP2 on my comp, and I have 4gbram on my comp. Only 2 are recognised, as far as I understand. Ive heard something about 32 and 64 bit systems, whats that? any compatibility issues when running 64? and is it worth the extra ram?
thanks in advance,
Philip, a bit of a noob with hardcore computing :)
1st thing that comes to mind is 2 hard drives that were set as a volume set (RAID 0). If so, when you changed the settings you probily broke the RAID configuration. Verify if you have 2 drives and look at those BIOS settings to see if it says anything about RAID. If so the install issue was not SATA but rather you needed to provide a RAID driver during setup.
4Gb RAM is the max a 32 bit OS can use without custome apps and hardware. However, the OS reserves some of that for specific uses. Shared Video RAM, Shadowed BIOS, reserved for the OS, etc, are examples. All thses subtract from the amount shown in XP as available for program use. There is still benefit from having 4 gb as it reduces the swapfile usage thus speeding up your system.
Vista 64 is suppose to be able to run 32bit apps. But, as its NOT a 32bit OS, expect issues when running 32 bit apps on it. Until there are 64bit versions of the software you use, not a whole lot of need for the general public to use a 64 bit OS
Bonjour from across the ocean! This is just what I was hunting for, and you nailed it. Thx