Windows 7: Questions about AHCI and SSD

I don't understand what AHCI is use for, could someone elaborate on this.

Do I need AHCI with an SSD and why?
I don't want to run a Raid setup.
I have 6 Sata II Seagate drives now so will AHCI screw them up if needed for the SSD?

Thanks much.

Read this article on AHCI: Advanced Host Controller Interface - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Also see this tutorial: AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

I imagine the SSD will run a lot faster with AHCI than IDE (non-RAID).

The 2 primary advantages from AHCI are hot swapping (which is advantageous on eSATA drives) and NCQ (native command queueing).

As far as performance goes, with my SSD on AHCI I see maybe a 10% performance increase at most. My random write 4k benchmark increased substantially when I went to AHCI.

Your other hard drives should be find...provided they aren't bootable drives with operating systems installed.

And finally, you don't need to run AHCI if you have an SSD drive. SSD's will run just fine under IDE mode.

I see almost no improvement using AHCI with my SSD (about 3-4%) and I have tried both extensively. Also, Patriot (the brand SSD I have) has recommended I use IDE because firmware updates and performance restore tools Patriot has do not work well with AHCI. Hope that helps.

Thanks everyone!

Not the case for me. As I posted in the SSD Performance thread, the speed increase was minuscule. I reverted back to IDE mode because with AHCI enabled, boot time increased by nearly 10 seconds.

Forgot to ask is there a hard drive utility program to copy files from a standard hard drive onto the SSD drive?

I should state that I have used CopyWipe for cloning drives. It's extremely fast and reliable.
I have used this for cloning the 'c' drive and it worked every time. It gets everything.
However I don't this it works with SSD's. I will send the developer an email asking.

You don't need a program to copy files from a HDD to a SSD. Just copy as usual

Yeah, that was the case for my. On my gigabyte GA-ep45-ud3r with the F9 bios, turning on AHCI introduced an 8 second delay at boot. With an upgrade to the F12 bios, that delay dropped to under 2 seconds. But I wasn't willing to give up 8 seconds at each boot for such a miscule performance increase.

Me either. I'm sticking with IDE mode.