Gigabyte MA-GA78GM-S2H Motherboard and SATA

[dudds23]

Hi just after some advice.

I have a Gigabyte MA-GA78GM-S2H motherboard which in the bios configures the hard drives as Native IDE.
It asks when i boot that im running them in this mode do i want to switch to AHCI which i have.

My question is should it be configured in AHCI mode or Native IDE which seems odd because its a sata drive?
My old board just set them up as SATA 1 SATA 2 ect.

When i switch to AHCI it seems the boot time takes alot longer for some reason.

Iv never come accross AHCI before so dont know what it is.

Cheers

[shaithis]

AHCI is a different method of accessing the drives.

It adds some benefits (TCQ most noticably, which should speed up access times if you have multiple process requesting various bits of data across the drive simultaneously) but unless you are using the machine as a server, or the drives are connected in RAID, the performance can be degraded by using AHCI instead of standard SATA modes.

[dudds23]

Thanks for getting back.

Its not a server nor is it set up in a RAID configuration.
There is no other option than to have Native IDE or AHCI in the bios.
It doesnt make scense on why they would set the board up in this way?

Do you think i should move away from this particular board?

[shaithis]

Personally, I would set it to Native IDE. Really not worth changing board over this at all unless you hit a problem with something and I very much doubt you ever will.

[Lee H]

Iv never come accross AHCI before so dont know what it is.

You can read a bit more into AHCI on the following paper from intel's website ;

http://download.intel.com/technology...pdf/rev1_3.pdf

[dudds23]

nice one thanks for that! Appreciate it.