AHCI Mode Setup

As one who has a Gigabyte board (Intel) since you hava a single drive all you need to do is enable the SATA type to AHCI. That's it.

Make sure the other SATA controllers are enabled and leave them at default. It's when you add drives and get into RAID that you might use other options. You have a single card.... no need to complicate things.



As for Smart Fan, if you want your CPU fan running full speed all the time, and don't mind the noise, than turn it off. If you want the speed controlled by the motherboard leave it on. Your choice.

PS. As for BIOS updates.... I always update to the latest one. A great many people recommend updating your BIOS. In fact if you call tech support on your motherboard they will tell you to update your BIOS. However I do caution that done wrong, you can mess up your board. That's where reading your manual comes in handy

Good luck.

Hi,
Thanks for your replies,

I have just bought one of these SSD Drives below, if I change the BIOS settings back to picture that I posted in my first reply will both the blue and white SATA ports be able to run in AHCI mode? What I am going to do is plug the SSD Drive into one of the white SATA ports on the board as these are the higher speeds out of the 2 and then the other drives will be in the blue SATA ports on the motherboard. I am aware that I will most likely need to reinstall Windows again.


OCZ 32GB Onyx SSD 2.5" SATA-II - Read 125MB/s.. | Ebuyer.com

TVeblen said:

The thing that concerns me when you say "change it back to the picture in my first post" is that those were the settings you had when you first had your original problem. Could be unrelated now that BIOS defaults have been reset, but:

It is always best IMHO to read and understand the motherboard manual and your motherboard. Your goal is to ENABLE the high speed SATA ports and CONFIGURE them as AHCI. That's it - no other changes should be necessary.

I do not have an AWARD BIOS, or the new 6GB SATA ports motherboard, so I am not confident telling you exactly what settings to change. But looking at your first post's picture:

• The first two settings are correct - don't change.
• The "Onboard SATA Port 4/5 Type" setting looks correct, but which ports are 4/5? There are 6 blue ports and 2 white ports, so which ones are 4/5 is not clear. Read the manual.
• The SATA RAID5 setting: necessary? Are you needing RAID? What are the other choices? What is it set on now (default)?
• SATA 3.0 Support: Enabled is good. SATA 3.0 is the new 6GB/sec SATA, not to be confused with the older 3GB/sec standard.
• SATA Port as ESP: I don't know what ESP is. Do you?
• GSATA: I don't know what GSATA ports are. Do you? But I read some quick links and it looks like GSATA is deigned specifically for RAID arrays. In that case you would not usually plug a single hard drive into the GSATA ports - it would be better to use a standard SATA port.

http://www.g-technology.com/news/pdf...introduced.pdf
Difference between GSATA and SATA - Hardware Peripherals

So when you get your new SSD you want to connect it to a 6GB SATA port, most likely one of the white ports, and you will read your manual to see which ports are SATA 6GB capable. It might be all of them. Then you just plug the SSD into Port 1 and go.

If you have W7 already installed on your spinning hard drive you could just "clone" the OS partition to the new SSD. But that is another topic!

Hi,

Many thanks for your reply its very informative. It appears that I got a bit confused with regards to the 2 different SATA ports. Upon checking the Gigabyte website the blue SATA ports are 6GB not the white ones. So the blue ports are what I need to use for the SSD drive. At the moment I am not using the white SATA ports so I am not going to make any further changes to the BIOS at present unless I run into problems, because the current settings in the BIOS are working okay.



I did think about cloning the drive but on my main drive there is the OS and games as well so if I cloned it it would probably not fit into the 32gb SSD. The SSD is just going to have the OS and drivers on it then I am going to use the 1TB for games and programs. The spare 400gb Samsung drive will be used as a back up for both drives in case of any problems.



Thanks again for everyones help.

essenbe said:

TVeblen, I don't know if this is relevant or not. I have an MSI board. On my board I have to enable raid and set the raid mode to ahci in order to enable ahci. I don't use raid but that is the only way to enable ahci.

Thanks for your reply.

Thats what I had to do on one of my previous MSI board as well when I had it in order for AHCI mode to work.