Question regarding AHCI and multiple HDDS

[Schamie]

Hi There

Im compeltely new to SSDs; I am installing 1 tomorrow; its the OCZ Technology 120GB Vertex 2 SATA II 2.5" Solid State Drive.

I have heard that its beneficial to enable AHCI and im doing a fresh reinstall of windows 74 64bit; however if im to enable AHCI will the data i have stored on my normal HDDS be available once windows is installed? or will those drives now be "unreadable" and have to be reformatted also?

mboard im using is a P6T SE

 

[Hawkeye22]

They will be readable.

 

[Schamie]

cheers now for another question; is it beneficial to use AHCI with the type of SSD ive mentioned? i have 2 networked PCs and a NAS as well as an Xbox on the multimedia platform.

 

[Hawkeye22]

It's better for all sata devices as it enables functions such as hot swap and NCQ... and the TRIM function for SSD's.

 

[Schamie]

sorry if it seems like im a bit noobish on these matters; its jsut i heard that NCQ was something that was better for networking rather than stand alone PCs as it could degrade the performance of read and write slightly? which is why i never enabled it when i installed windows 7 2 years ago; however i did not know AHCI was a requirement for TRIM support... at least that settles the fact i must enable it now cheers once again for your help

 

[Hawkeye22]

NCQ helps with larger queue depths, but also benefits SSD's

For example, Intel's X25-E Extreme solid-state drive uses NCQ to ensure that the drive has commands to process while the host system is busy processing CPU tasks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Command_Queuing

 

[Schamie]

so my understanding of NCQ is that the drive takes some of the workload off the CPU when it comes to SSD and HDD operations? the same way a dedicated gaming network card would do?

 

[Hawkeye22]

In a way yes. It also reorders reads so that it can read more continuous blocks of data, thus preventing the read heads from thrashing all over the drive.

Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is an extension of the Serial ATA protocol allowing hard disk drives to internally optimize the order in which received read and write commands are executed. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary drive head movement, resulting in increased performance (and slightly decreased wear of the drive) for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, most often occurring in server-type applications.

Now that desktops have multi-core cpu's and programs are becomming more multithreaded, NCQ is becoming more relevent on the desktop.