Windows 7: AHCI and optical drives

I am completing a new build PC on a Gigabyte GA-H55MHUD2H board using SATA hdd. For the first time I have bought a SATA (rather than the common, legacy IDE) optical drive by Samsung model SH-S223 22x. I stumbled across a forum post warning against selecting AHCI because lock-ups and BSOD events would be caused by the combination of an optical drive and AHCI mode. I subsequently found a specific reference to this Samsung drive by a guy who like me had purchased it fitting into a new build. With AHCI mode on it would not even boot from the DVD Win 7 installations disk!!!!!

I am reluctant to engage myself in all the hassle for overcoming the deficiencies of these hardware incompatibilities but for one thing - I bought a very nice Coolermaster 690 II Advance case and it has a sexy SATA hdd dock very conveniently placed on top of the case which I planned to use as a hot swap port slipping in an hdd for convenient transfer and file backup.

Can anyone shed light on these problems and confirm whether or not they are now resolved? A shufty at the Gigabyte and Samsung websites turned up nothing but I guess it is a BIOS problem anyway? Perhaps I should stick with IDE mode and patiently power down between docking and undocking the portable hdd.

I cannot speak on specifics relating to a Gigabyte motherboard and Samsung drive or with Intel. However, in my setup (specs below) I have 2 SATA ODDs (one Blu-Ray/HDDVD/DVDRW+/- and the other DVDROM) with AHCI enabled (actually RAID). I have not had any problems whatsoever booting from either of the ODDs

There should be absolutely no problems related to AHCI at this day and age. And with plenty of people running RAID (AHCI), you'd expect to hear about it more frequently if it was an issue.

The most common problem you hear about is how an already existing Windows installation will bluescreen if and only if it has already been installed AFTER the change is made. But this also assumes that a simple registry change was not made beforehand; as if the key change is made the system will boot just fine.

If your optical drive doesn't like it as claimed by the reviewer, then you'll run into the problem... before it actually is a problem.