AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

You would need to look in the bios settings for hard drives. The option for Raid as well as ide mode and AHCI would be found in the Integrated Periperals section.

As for your finding on drivers there that shows you have the necessary drivers already installed. That should out the need for any worry about getting drivers on when switching modes.

Here the board came already set to the AHCI mode from the factory but 7 was dragging. I then switched it to the Native ide mode until lately seeing the clean install go on.

The initial install however was to one of the sata 3 not sata II drives when getting the case together. Apparently the S3 controller is a bit more fussy.

Hum Night Hawk all I have is what the HDD brand is in Main there is nothing to do with HDD's in Advanced and then it just goes onto Display Security Boot and Exit - it seems a very simplistic BIOS to me.

Anyway it is running a light speed faster than the old Vista did witha WEI of 4.5 so no real worries.

All the drivers are up to scratch so am not that concerned and I am certain the owner will be pleased with the end result.

Thanks for the tips though I shall keep those in mind (whats left of it LOL!!)

Sometimes the options are hidden from view depending on which bios program is being used. Here it would be Award on the Gigabyte model board.

When pressing enter on the hard drives item you might find a sub menu for settings there likely if at all under Boot. Is this on a laptop or desktop by the way? Generally laptops will tend to see the limited bios options.

Thanks Night Hawk yeah my friend this one is a Phoenix BIOS and it doesn't let you "land" on th HDD - it is a very very basic BIOS from what I am used to.

Ouch! That's a tuff break for you alright!

No probs mate I suppose after all is said and done it is running faster than that dog Vista she had on it.

AHCI is basically SCSI mode. The old term there was used for faster means of storage back in the 90s when you would more often hear the term SCSI array since companies were looking for faster access to data stored on network and other drives.

Switching to the AHCI mode sees Windows mount the volumes on the drives a little bit differently. You see that during the post screens when no factory logo screen is enabled where an extra screen appears to list the drives presently in the AHCI mode as SCSI devices.

With an SSD the technology is what is different there being similar in nature to a usb flash drive only seeing larger capacities for most unless you grab an expensive flash drive! Boot time is the preference there over the faster access time seen when in the AHCI mode.

As for RAID mainly that is best applied to server applications rather then your main OS drive. There are also various types of RAID and arrays as well such as either mirrored or even taking a single volume and spanning it across several drives to increase the total capacity.

One thing I found here was when the board has an ide or Native ide mode depending on who made it and it comes set to AHCI by default you can run into problems with any fresh install of 7. The board here came set to AHCI by default and when the initial install of 7 went on it seemed to be taking far too long for Windows to load up.

When switching over to the Native ide mode suddenly 7 was starting right up as it should in pronto time! Apparently something was lacking and more recently when in need of another clean install of 7 I waited this time until all drivers were on along with everything and then simply switched modes.

The results were instantly requiring a restart to finish the install Windows perform as mentioned earlier in the guide here. Likewise I suspect the SSD install may also run into some problems setting it to AHCI too soon before you have all the board drivers on at least which would include the sata/Raid controller as well as ide controller drivers necessary.

There's a big difference between RAID and AHCI to know however. For a start Raid is what it is pairing up drives if not adding more into an array. AHCI on the other hand is a particular drive mode where any volume is mounted as a logical drive with a slight difference to boost access times.

To understand that better a good write up on SCSI can be looked over at SCSI and RAID hard drives