Show us your SSD performance

Fair enough.

tw33k said:

I enabled AHCI on my board and only gained a slight increase in performance however it slowed boot time right down so I went back to IDE mode. (see attached)

If the OS was not installed with AHCI enabled, enabling it after the fact will not help you. Indeed, as you have seen, it can actually hurt your machine's performance.

I had the same issue when I recently built my new system. I first installed Win7 onto my SSD with IDE enabled. After installation I tried switching to AHCI. My system would not even boot. I wound up wiping my drive and starting the install process over from scratch.

tw33k said:

Gildor said:

If the OS was not installed with AHCI enabled, enabling it after the fact will not help you. Indeed, as you have seen, it can actually hurt your machine's performance.

I had the same issue when I recently built my new system. I first installed Win7 onto my SSD with IDE enabled. After installation I tried switching to AHCI. My system would not even boot. I wound up wiping my drive and starting the install process over from scratch.

I was curious to see the effect. Regardless of whether I enable it before installing the OS or not, the boot time will be slower with AHCI as the mobo does it's thing prior to loading windows. I might still try it but does anyone really think performance will improve? As it stands the ssd is performing very well. I can't see the benefit of enabling AHCI. Perhaps I just don't understand it properly.

I saw no difference in the BIOS part of the boot process whether IDE or AHCI was enabled. The difference for me was in Windows booting.

The benefit is that TRIM is passed along to the SSD only in AHCI mode, so you will not get the advantage of auto TRIM in IDE mode.

Here's an interesting article that was just published a couple days ago. The Kingston folks talk a little about how they consider SSDs actually having increased reliability over dino drives. And gives some encouraging information of what happens when SSDs ultimately wear out (they are still readable, just not writeable, so data recovery is possible). It also references some of their antics trying to destroy SSDs (baseball bat, auto, blowtorch....).

Q&A: Tom's Hardware And Kingston On SSD Technology : Kingston Up Close - Review Tom's Hardware

pparks1 said:

However, with my Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R Rev 1.1 motherboard, when AHCI is enabled, there is an 8 second delay as the AHCI components are initializing during the POST of my machine at every boot. Unfortunately, with AHCI enabled, it costs me 8 seconds at every boot. Any my stopwatch and testing methods show that I'm not really able to gain that 8 seconds back from performance increases with the drive in a few hour period of time.

I did not do any stopwatch measuring using IDE and AHCI, but I did not percieve any diifferences in boot time on my system. Whether that means I had it and did not not notice it or maybe my MSI Pro-E motherboard acts differently I don't know. I assume you installed the OS with AHCI enabled?

pparks1 said:

Gildor said:

The benefit is that TRIM is passed along to the SSD only in AHCI mode, so you will not get the advantage of auto TRIM in IDE mode.

From what I have read, this is not true when using the default Windows 7 drivers for TRIM support. I believe this is true with I install the Intel drivers for my SATA controllers according to the Intel website...therefore I just stuck with the Windows drivers and things seem to be just fine.

As an aside, Intel is supposed to be releasing a version of their drivers which do support auto TRIM "real soon now".

whs said:

But I am still scouting for the Intel wiper. I found one for OCZ, but I am not sure whether that would work on an Intel. Have to ask the boys on the Intel forum.

Check out the Intel SSD Toolbox. It has an optimizer just for that purpose.