Zorg
Splendid
newnerd :
Hi Zorg:
In his posts I wasn't able to determine his primary choice for his drive(s). Since he has a nice 750 GB SATA drive I would assume he wants the best possible performance and I wasn't sure if Vista O.S. would contain compatible RAID/SATA AHCI drivers since the AHC9R sata controller didn't come out until after Vista. Sure, he could run in IDE mode but wouldn't that limit the speed of his late model Sata drive. Also my suggestion would allow him the option to use RAID if he adds additional SATA drives later. I don't claim to be a genius and would never diss someone else's opinions when we're all just trying to help others in here.
In his posts I wasn't able to determine his primary choice for his drive(s). Since he has a nice 750 GB SATA drive I would assume he wants the best possible performance and I wasn't sure if Vista O.S. would contain compatible RAID/SATA AHCI drivers since the AHC9R sata controller didn't come out until after Vista. Sure, he could run in IDE mode but wouldn't that limit the speed of his late model Sata drive. Also my suggestion would allow him the option to use RAID if he adds additional SATA drives later. I don't claim to be a genius and would never diss someone else's opinions when we're all just trying to help others in here.
I believe that the drivers for the Intel Matrix Storage Manager for the ICH8 and ICH9 are the same. Everyone seems to want AHCI because it is the latest and greatest. AHCI is good if you want RAID, NCQ, or hot swap. Other than that, the increase in speed appears to be negligible.
NCQ can give increased speed but it can also give decreased speed depending on the application. I believe that NCQ is primarily of importance in the server environment as opposed to the desktop. Additionally, the variations appear to be different depending on the HD.
From what I have read if you want a lot of drives working simultaneously you may be able to show a more substantial benefit by going to AHCI. I could be wrong about that. Certainly, if you want to set up a RAID in the future it would be wise to enable AHCI. IMO, for one or two disks there is no real benefit to AHCI at this point. I'm sure many disagree. If he is having problems it would be wise to set the SATA to IDE emulation and move forward.