Serial ATA AHCI, worth it?

[youpla]

Can someone tell me if it worth enabling AHCI for Sata HDD and what are the benefits if any over standard IDE? I read about hot plug, commmand queuing and power management etc...

And is there any incompatibility with this mode and some software?

TIA

 

[PV5150]

First off: If you have a SATA HDD formatted under AHCI it will be unreadable if you decide to return back to IDE Emulation. That I know.

AHCI Wiki explains it best.

Are you running this under Windows XP?

 

[youpla]

thanks PV, yep noticed that there is incompatibility between IDE and AHCI disk...

I installed vista on the AHCI drive... seems to work well but then when I tried to plugin my previous drive non AHCI and boot from there it didn't work. Turned off AHCI in bios and was able to boot from my previous disk.

From the wiki it seems that the command queuing is maybe valuable for server type config which requires lots of read/write etc..., not sure it work a penny in my case though

 

[PV5150]

Yeah agreed, I don't think that you'll see an increase in performance (read/write) at all...nothing noticeable from what you'll be needing it for anyway.

 

[youpla]

Time to reformat the disk in IDE mode then...

thanks

 

[BUFF]

for your average, every day user imo it's not worth it - no real gains & a little extra hassle.