Should I run my optical drive on AHCI or IDE?

Lemon Tree · 07 Aug 2013

Hiya

Today I'll be building my computer and my mobo runs the SATA port(the one for the optical drive) in AHCI mode by default, was wondering would you guys recommend running it in AHCI or IDE for my blu ray drive? If AHCI should be used, will I need to install any drivers or set up anything else? Many thanks.

Off topic question, if I run my SSD drive in AHCI mode, will I still need to install the AHCI driver from my mobo disc after setting up windows 7? Many thanks.

herqulees · 07 Aug 2013

AHCI all the way, IDE mode is only there for support on older operating systems from what I've learned, plus AHCI is faster. As far as drivers you should install all the drivers for your MB even if Windows doesn't ask for them, I would recommend going to the website and getting the most up to date ones though, the CD could be months old by now.

andrew129260 · 07 Aug 2013

Rule number 1 of tech: Never use the included cds. Always download the latest from the MFTR.
And I def. agree with the post above. I saw a night and day difference. Although in my case I didn't realize my bios decided to put it in IDE. AHCI all the way.

OvenMaster · 07 Aug 2013

I have had two mobos that gave very poor performance when using SATA optical drives in AHCI mode with AHCI drivers, specifically when ripping audio using Exact Audio Copy. With AHCI, my rip speeds never went higher than 1.5x. With IDE mode, my rips start at 9x. My present Gigabyte board allows two of its six SATA ports to run IDE mode while the rest use AHCI mode, and those two ports are where my DVD burners go.

madcratebuilder · 08 Aug 2013

OvenMaster said:

I have had two mobos that gave very poor performance when using SATA optical drives in AHCI mode with AHCI drivers, specifically when ripping audio using Exact Audio Copy. With AHCI, my rip speeds never went higher than 1.5x. With IDE mode, my rips start at 9x. My present Gigabyte board allows two of its six SATA ports to run IDE mode while the rest use AHCI mode, and those two ports are where my DVD burners go.

That's interesting, I'm going to check my opticals. Two ASUS drives using AHCI on SATA . It's a Gigabyte 990fxa.

I had assumed a SATA connector optical drive would want AHCI.

bobafetthotmail · 08 Aug 2013

Afaik, AHCI is the norm for hard drives and solid state drives.

Given the speed most burners can get from the optical disk anyway, either will do. Even the fastest blu-rays don't get beyond 80 MB/s of transfer speed (reading), even an actual IDE interface will do (max speed around 130 MB/s). Nevermind that SATA IDE mode is much faster than that.

Given the specific limitations of my board I'm forced to keep the DVD drive in IDE mode (otherwise it's not seen at boot, only the first three sata ports on my board can be set as AHCI and be booted from, and they are already occupied). No speed difference reported.