Crucial M4 256GB SSD: Enable AHCI?

[kairotic]

System Specs:

ASRock Professional Gen3 Fatal1ty (Z68)
i7 2600K
HD 7970
8GB @ 2133 (10, 11, 10, 28, 1T)
256GB Crucial M4 SSD


My HDD controller is currently set to IDE mode. I have Win 7 64bit installed, and upon running WEI I get a 7.5 for Hard Drive.

In order for me to enable AHCI, it seems I will have to reinstall the OS. Should I spend the time to do this? Can I get a better score than 7.5? (I feel like this drive should get 7.9)

Is there another way around it where I won't have to re-install Windows?

I set the registry setting to '0' that will apparently enable windows to install AHCI drivers, but after rebooting and setting the controller to AHCI my system will hang. Setting to RAID will cause me to do a CMOS reset.

Any help is appreciated!

 

[amdwilliam1985]

I have similar concern as the OP a few weeks ago. And then I saw some post somewhere mentioned a SSD benchmark(CyrstalDiskMark) where the "4K QD32" section has a very significant variance in terms of performance(between ide and ahci).

That's when I took the effort and reinstalled my windows 7 last week. My current benchmark score is similar to a comparable SDD now.