AHCI benifits

[rizvii]

is ther any benifit of AHCI configuration. should i use AHCI or IDE legacy

[redwudz]

AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) is said to be a bit more efficient and gives you hot swapping and native command queuing, which can increase transfer speed and reduce hard drive wear. It has native support with Vista, but not many other platforms. And not all chipsets have it available. If you see it in BIOS, and you have a OS that supports it, it works fine. If you don't activate when you install the OS, you have to do a bit of registry repair before you can use it or you will get a BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death), which will lock up your system. But you can do a internet search to find how to activate it with a existing OS, so it's not really that hard.

I use it on a couple of Vista computers and it does seem to give a bit better performance and the hot plugging works well as you can just plug in a SATA drive and Vista will recognize it right away, just like a USB drive. It works fine on my systems for hard drives and optical drives.

Unless you have Vista, I wouldn't bother with AHCI, just my opinion. The hot swapping is the best feature for me, but you can add a SATA drive and reboot and the SATA drive will be added by the OS anyway, so not a really important feature. The reduced wear and better transfer speed is debatable, but it does seem a bit faster, though I haven't benchmarked it.

[rallynavvie]

Also I believe you need AHCI enabled in order to run more than 4 SATA drives. I think I ran into that when I realized I hadn't enabled it and updated the driver.