Windows 7: AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Hello Gu1air, welcome to Seven Forums!



I'm glad you found a solution; thanks for the post.

Dave76

My SSD is my C drive. The is why I got the boost in Performance. I have downloaded the performance software you suggested, but haven't had time to run it yet. When I do I will post the results on the places you said.

Looking forward to seeing them

Add my kudos for an excellent and straightforward fix! Thanks!

Hello roknrob, welcome to Seven Forums; I'm glad it could be a help.

you can update your SATA controller driver to the AHCI version using the right driver(s) then reboot ur machine and set AHCI in BIOS to enable (whatever the words are in BIOS)

if u can get to windows after setting it then it works.

basically SSD is much much faster than harddisk, so the WEI gain is very understandable.

imho and based on my own experience after setting AHCI in Windows 7, benchmarks don't justify real-time performance but i see significant gain in copying large files (mkv files @ 1-8gb)

now the Q : after setting AHCI i got my 2 harddisks showed in the Safely Remove Hardware systray icon. is there any way to solve this? coz i think it's a bit annoying.

To quote from Wikipedia, and to be honest I thought it would have more on AHCI, but apparently not... Anyway, to explain why AHCI mode shows your drives in the 'Safely Remove Hardware' list:

so the quote is saying that my drives being shown in "safely remove" list due to this hot-plugging capability.. cmiiw. thx man.. then i will have to pay extra attention when removing external devices after this hehehe

Yup, that is correct.. I've had to do much the same, but at least here we can be glad that MS finally got Windows to show the volume label in the 'Safely Remove Hardware' list! Something that should've been included since XP as far as I'm concerned... You do get quite used to it though.


@ Bare Foot Kid:
Just a thought, but I only just noticed your open post doesn't really mention any reasons or benefits for switching to AHCI.. Thinking about it now, I actually went to Google it and see what AHCI was and what was different to normal SATA when I first found this tutorial.

Perhaps to enhance it a little bit, at the start you could mention a brief description of the NCQ process (more info here) that AHCI uses? Might also be an idea to mention that AHCI also enables hot swapping support for SATA devices.. Just some constructive criticism, hope you don't mind.