Why does my SSD boot slower with AHCI enabled?

AVR2

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Feb 4, 2016
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I've just upgraded my parents' 2008-vintage Vista PC (32-bit Home Basic) with a SanDisk SSD in place of the old boot drive. It now runs much faster, as you'd expect, but only if you leave the BIOS set to "Native IDE". If you set it to "IDE>AHCI" (which is the only AHCI-related option), it boots slower than the old hard drive. Any ideas why?

I'd like to know I've got everything running as fast as it possibly can, given the limitations of the SATA II motherboard and OS. Should I just leave it as "Native IDE" and be happy with that, or should I try and find a way of getting full speed via "IDE>AHCI"?

FWIW, I've done the registry hack to enable AHCI. I've also looked to see if there are any firmware updates for the mobo relating to AHCI, but I can't see anything other than stuff related to Win7. Is it worth updating to those anyway?
 
Solution
Hey there, AVR2.

You could try updating the firmware of the SSD itself it there's an available update and/or the BIOS as well, to see if that changes things up. Other than that you could leave it with the IDE SATA mode if you see no difference. Basically Vista is a bit of an outdated version of Windows, which does not support TRIM. If you don't know what TRIM is, roughly described this is an OS function which helps the SSD get rid of unnecessary residual/leftover data and this way it keeps the SSD at its optimal performance throughout its entire life. Basically you can say that it's "cleaning it".
However, I think that you might be able to use TRIM via 3rd party software, but you'd have to look into that.

Hope that helps. Please let...
Hey there, AVR2.

You could try updating the firmware of the SSD itself it there's an available update and/or the BIOS as well, to see if that changes things up. Other than that you could leave it with the IDE SATA mode if you see no difference. Basically Vista is a bit of an outdated version of Windows, which does not support TRIM. If you don't know what TRIM is, roughly described this is an OS function which helps the SSD get rid of unnecessary residual/leftover data and this way it keeps the SSD at its optimal performance throughout its entire life. Basically you can say that it's "cleaning it".
However, I think that you might be able to use TRIM via 3rd party software, but you'd have to look into that.

Hope that helps. Please let me know how it goes.
Boogieman_WD
 
Solution