Drive Questions

[HSK]

Hi, i recently put togther a machine, after ages - around Y2K last time. so anyways, first time i been using new drives etc - i put the machine together, works fine etc - but i noticed one thing in the bios, a setting under the Integrated Peripherals menu - the SATA controlers in the southbridge are set on disabled (PATA), and so is the onboard gigabyte controler (althought i just have one IDE drive in the channel for that, and no SATA drives).

When i set them on AHCI mode from the bios, i got a blue screen of death when starting vista - i soon read upon this and worked out that vista doesn't load the drivers for this when installing if you had the setting on default (like how i had), in the bios. so after a lil registry tweak, vista booted, and installed most (i think) of these ATA channel driver, but it took ages, and didn't shut down properly. i had to power off from the mains.

next time i started windows, the lil progress bar in the boot screen just keep going past. nothing else. and it wud freeze every 2/3 seconds, for a 1 second. i noticed it did this aswell when it was installing the ATA channel drivers in vista before, when it did boot for the fist time after the tweaking.

i set it back to disabled in the bios (back to PATA) and, windows started as normal, fine again.

sorry this is really long - what i need to know, is it a really big difference, and better to use the AHCI mode enabled for the SATA drive? i can re-install windows again with it set in the bios this time and try it that way.

also i noticed when there is heavy hard drive activity, WMP while playing mp3's distorts and stutters here & there. could this be solved if i switch to AHCI?

im new to this, so i have no idea! any help would be much appreciated.

Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R
Western Digital Caviar SE16 500GB SATA216MB 7200RPM