Blu ray Drive in IDE mode or AHCI?

[vlad06]

Hey guys,

To cut a long story short, I am trying to use a hot swap SSD to boot into an XP OS. My motherboard is the Asus M5a99x EVO r2 and the only way to get this to work is if I assign the SATA port to IDE. However, the motherboard's SATA ports are grouped together in the BIOS so I have either the option to make ports 1-4 AHCI or IDE, or ports 5-6. I've worked out that I can do this separate installation and boot if the SATA port is assigned to be IDE.

I want to assign ports 5-6 to IDE and have port 5 as my hot swap SSD and port 6 as my Samsung Blu Ray drive. The question is, how will assigning the the port to IDE affect the performance/speed of my Blu Ray drive?

Also, will having the SSD in IDE mode pretty much eradicate the speed benefits of having the SSD in the first place?

 

[joex444]

XP is really old and weird, but basically the way to get this to work is go and find the AHCI drivers for that board's SATA controller and reinstall XP with the drives in AHCI mode. You'll need to provide it the AHCI driver as part of the install to let it find the drives. If it sees them, then it will work OK.

This is mostly an issue with your OS being older than SATA.

 

[vlad06]

Hey

Thanks for that, I do know this already but I just spent a lot of time installing stuff on the XP SSD so I may leave it as IDE. Do you have an answer to my question please?

Thanks

 

[TbsToy]

With XP the ole if it ain't broken. . .
W.P.

 

[vlad06]

With XP the ole if it ain't broken. . .
W.P.

Sorry what?

 

[shiitaki]

Hey

Thanks for that, I do know this already but I just spent a lot of time installing stuff on the XP SSD so I may leave it as IDE. Do you have an answer to my question please?

Thanks

No Blu Ray drive can not come close to taxing any SATA port, so you should fine. The data rates for optical disks are insignificant compared to SSD's or hard drives. AHCI is needed for TRIM, which could be important depending on your SSD. The difference becoming evident after your drive has more writes than it's capacity. The difference will be a significant drop in write performance. If your SSD has good garbage collection, then you could be fine. XP can not partition a SSD properly, so hopefully you used a utility that came with the SSD, or initialized the disk on a computer that could offset by 4KB blocks instead of 512B blocks that XP uses. A SSD should really be formatted using AHCI and GPT for these reasons.

Or another words if you installed the SSD brand new and installed using the XP installer and nothing else, you are probably not getting the performance you paid for, and could be wearing out your drive as well. You should google software that can check and possibly align the sectors.

 

[vlad06]

Hey

Thanks for that, I do know this already but I just spent a lot of time installing stuff on the XP SSD so I may leave it as IDE. Do you have an answer to my question please?

Thanks

No Blu Ray drive can not come close to taxing any SATA port, so you should fine. The data rates for optical disks are insignificant compared to SSD's or hard drives. AHCI is needed for TRIM, which could be important depending on your SSD. The difference becoming evident after your drive has more writes than it's capacity. The difference will be a significant drop in write performance. If your SSD has good garbage collection, then you could be fine. XP can not partition a SSD properly, so hopefully you used a utility that came with the SSD, or initialized the disk on a computer that could offset by 4KB blocks instead of 512B blocks that XP uses. A SSD should really be formatted using AHCI and GPT for these reasons.

Or another words if you installed the SSD brand new and installed using the XP installer and nothing else, you are probably not getting the performance you paid for, and could be wearing out your drive as well. You should google software that can check and possibly align the sectors.

Thanks for that, a very comprehensive answer. I have tested some Blu Ray discs and the films play fine (although the audio is very poor, could this be related to IDE?). I will run the Corsair SSD toolbox and see if there is anything in there to optimise the SSD for Windows XP.