Windows 7: Raid 0 + AHCI?

So I picked up a pair of Corsair Force 120Gb SSD drives and set them up in RAID 0. Figured I could just slap them in, load the AMD RAID drivers then do a clean install of Win 7. Which I’ve done and everything seems to be working fine. Now reading about the performance benefits when setting your drive controller to AHCI within Windows. My question is, can I still set the controller to AHCI within Windows even though I’ve configured the drives in a RAID 0? The BIOS only allows 3 choices, IDE, RAID and AHCI. It’s a Asus M4A7TD EVO Motherboard (AMD 870/SB 850 chipset)

Thanks for the reply but still didn’t really answer my question. My BIOS is set to RAID 0 for my 2 SSD. I assumed that setting this to AHCI within the BIOS I would lose the RAID and therefor have to reinstall Windows. However, the many SSD tweaks that I’ve read (SSD Tweaks and Optimizations in Windows 7) state to set your IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller within device manager to AHCI. Would this not conflict with what the BIOS is set at?

You can pick RAID or AHCI not both. When you pick RAID most times Windows will install a RAID driver that gives performance like the AHCI or better.

If you want AHCI you will need to break the RAID and reload Windows. -WS

On PC's, the implementation of RAID is a superset of AHCI.
or alternatively, AHCI is a subset of RAID.

since you have your BIOS already set to RAID, you're good to go. you're getting all the NCQ and other AHCI jazz.

Even though RAID-0 is... well, i hope you have good frequent backups.

Just as packet explained, my understanding is that with RAID chosen, you will get the benefits of AHCI.

Took a few posts, but the correct info got out there. AHCI and RAID are two different settings, as explained above. You can set your BIOS to one or the other. You could have seen this by going into your BIOS and looking through the controller options. The "tweaks" you read about were concerning systems without arrays, and just drives used as separate drives.

If he wants to run in AHCI mode and lose the RAID functionality, yes. I'm a firm believer in the Anandtech tests that prove RAID0 is a waste in a desktop environment. However, that was with mechanical drives. I'm not sure about SSDs, but if it was me, Instead of buying two drives, I would have just bought a single larger one and run it in AHCI.

Agreed, it looks great in benchmarks...but real world performance?????? With the OS and such, it's not about fast sustained writes, but rather fast random I/O...and the RAID configuration isn't helping in that area.

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