Windows 7: Coming from XP, enable AHCI for SATA drives?

Hi all, I searched and was unable to find this specific question answered.

I'm coming from win XP and I've got 3 SATA drives currently operating in IDE mode. I am just about to move to Windows 7 Pro and I was considering setting the motherboard to recognize the drives as AHCI. I am going to reformat one drive completely for the OS drive.

My questions are:



1. Will this negatively affect my other two storage drives because they had previously been running in IDE mode?

2. Is there a way to determine whether or not my drives support AHCI at all? (They're all SATA drives bought in the last 4 years.)

3. I intend to run XP mode, will AHCI mode pose any problems for this?

Thanks for the help, I've just discovered this forum and it looks like a fantastic resource.

ronin688, welcome to the Seven Forums.

Too answer your questions,

1. Not in the slightest. The OS and the driver(s) installed there are what determine whether any attached drives run in AHCI.

2. As far as I know all SATA drives will run in AHCI mode.

3. Won't make any difference as it will be running in a VM, so the host configuration won't affect it.

On the bright side with setting the SATA controllers to SATA/AHCI mode formatting before installing Windows 7, with the motherboard listed in your specs you shouldn't need to install the SATA driver as Windows 7 has native SATA/AHCI support.

Thanks for the quick and helpful response.

I've been using XP so long and am so used to it that I haven't had to look for answers like these in quite a while. I'm really glad to find such a thriving community like this one for Windows 7.