ahci ide mix

[stevew295]

Not sure whether to post here or motherboards. I have a Asus Sabertooth 55i with 5 hard drives. I do NOT have a RAID setup. I want to add a 250 or 500gb SSD and make it the boot drive. The existing drives/operating system was installed with BIOS set to IDE, not AHCI (seems like maybe I couldn't get it to install when set to AHCI, but I might be thinking of a prior build). My question is, will there be any problems in disconnecting all HD's, install SSD with BIOS set to AHCI, install OS, then add back the HD's. Any problem in the fact that they were formatted when BIOS was set to IDE, or does that only matter for the boot drive? I have recorded many many VHS family home tapes to the HD's (25gb avi file per VHS), now I need to start converting to DVD. I thought installing a SSD would speed up the rendering when doing the conversion process.

The DVD burner would then make a total of 7 drives. So, I would either need an add-in SATA card, or, and here is the part that probably should go in motherboard section:, there are 6 SATA ports, and two Jmicron ports, shown as SATA_E1 & SATA_E2. I'm not using those, can I use one of those, or are they for specific purposes? I don't think the E-1/2 means External, as there is a External Sata port on the back of the motherboard.

Thanks, Steve

 

[Someone Somewhere]

AHCI/IDE only matters for the boot drive.

You can use the Jmicron ports, but they're a little slower and might be a driver hassle if you wanted to boot from them. I'd also avoid running optical drives off them.

Unfortunately, an SSD probably won't speed up your rendering much - it's likely to be the CPU that's the bottleneck. Any storage bottleneck would certainly be gone if you read from one HDD and wrote to another.

 

[freeskier93]

Yep, only matters for boot. If you’re comfortable with modifying the registry you switch from IDE to AHCI without having to reinstall Windows.

 

[stevew295]

AHCI/IDE only matters for the boot drive.

You can use the Jmicron ports, but they're a little slower and might be a driver hassle if you wanted to boot from them. I'd also avoid running optical drives off them.

Unfortunately, an SSD probably won't speed up your rendering much - it's likely to be the CPU that's the bottleneck. Any storage bottleneck would certainly be gone if you read from one HDD and wrote to another.

CPU is i5 750, using Adobe Premiere Elements. I thought a SSD would help, as long as I set it as "scratch disk" as well as OS/boot disk. But, I'm not knowledgeable at all regarding Premiere Elements. If that's the case, then I'll skip the SSD. Thanks.

 

[stevew295]

Yep, only matters for boot. If you’re comfortable with modifying the registry you switch from IDE to AHCI without having to reinstall Windows.

Thanks. I've seen that mentioned, modifying the registry. But, even if I don't get a SSD, it is still time to reinstall Windows anyways, to get rid of the "Clutter". Thanks, Steve

 

[Someone Somewhere]

I'm not sure about the more fancy video-editing stuff. If you were just encoding it using something like Handbrake, it probably wouldn't change anything.

My guess is that scratch drives are mainly useful when doing non-linear stuff, or when you're saving it back into the original file at the end of it.