Do I want my SATA to be AHCI ?

[tashirosgt]

The motherboard
http://www.gigabyte.us/Products/Moth...ProductID=3145

has BIOS that lets you set the function of various SATA controllers to be "Native IDE" "RAID" or "AHCI" (Advanced Hardware Controller Interface).

I'm not going to use RAID. The machine has only one hard drive, which is SATA. Do I gain anything by setting the hard drive's controller to "AHCI" instead of "Native IDE"?

(I notice that a SATA DVD-RW connected to a "AHCI" SATA is not recognized as the boot device "CDROM" on this motherboard, but the hard drive is.)

[buurin]

My motherboard has a IDE/AHCI setting in BIOS for two of the 6 SATA ports. Look for a similar setting in your BIOS that allows certain SATA ports be native IDE while the rest AHCI. For my motherboard with AMD 785G/SB710 chipset I don't know which driver it uses for IDE, but it does support AHCI and it gives me hot plug, so AHCI it is.

[Firewing1]

Although in my tests it barely made a difference, AHCI theoretically offers better performance than Native IDE. It also enables some nice features like native command queuing (NCQ) and drive hotswapping.

[stevea]

I'm with firewing. I also did tests ~1yr ago and the difference was typically small. The place where you gain an advantage are when a lot of disk seeks are queued up.

So yes - use AHCI, but don't expect a miraculous difference.