Windows 7: Selecting AHCI SATA mode: Dell Inspirion 530s

Hello,
I am a user of the vistax64 forums and found thread on the 7 forums related to a problem I have. I use vista but I don't think my problem is OS independent. Anyway, I stumbled upon this thread:
Sata Mode AHCI / IDE

A user, Unifex, posted this "Well, that's the thing for Dell Inspiron - there is no separate setting in the BIOS for AHCI. Only IDE and RAID. But, RAID actually corresponds to AHCI, so by choosing RAID I actually get the AHCI BIOS screen and so on"



That is exactly what I want to know how to do. How do you get the AHCI BIOS screen after selecting RAID in the Inspirion 530s BIOS? I am aware this is a very hardware specific question. I hope this is appropriate for these forums. Unifex, if you happen to be reading this post, I would greatly appreciate your input considering your familiarity of this BIOS.

Hello,

I believe the RAID option is for the AHCI. There inst a separate BIOS Screen for this option although it may show a few more settings on the BIOS relating to the RAID. If you are going to setup your OS so that it uses AHCI then you will have to download the drivers first or your system wont boot.

For a little more information have a look at this:
Difference Between AHCI and IDE | Difference Between | AHCI vs IDE

And:
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...L/appendix.htm


Dave

yes, I read through the manual. The only part useful in this discussion is where it explains what is in your bios. It doesn't explain what any of the settings do.

I see no extra setting related to RAID in the bios. It's either on or off. But you think I could set it to RAID, download the drivers for AHCI and that would set up my system for AHCI?

I wouldn't necessarily assume that RAID gives you AHCI. Personally, I wouldn't use RAID unless I was actually configuring an array.

Let's step back up a second. What specific feature or problem are you having that AHCI is the answer over IDE?

Yeah, Deacon is right. What problem are you trying to solve??

What I'm getting at is this. There's very little reason to switch to AHCI just for the sake of switching. It isn't really faster, especially when you are using a spinner and not an SSD. You wouldn't be hot swapping, either, with one drive in your system. Given that it isn't a specific option, I would take that to mean it isn't offered, and just stick with IDE.

Even with a SSD it is not really necessary. Yes it shows better nums in AHCI when you measure it, but in real life you will not notice the difference.

From what I understand an SSD will run about the same on both IDE and AHCI intially after install;however, overtime the SSD will have a significant loss in performance over time. What I would like to do is install an SSD. That's why I wanted to enable AHCI

I am not sure about the loss of performance. A couple of my SSDs run in IDE mode (same problem with the BIOS) and I did not really notice a performance degradation. One of them is 4 years old - a Gen1 Intel.

I was under the impression that setting the controller to AHCI for an SSD would allow Windows 7 to properly identify and configure itself for the SSD.