ssd drive as boot device on EX38-DS4 - AHCI?

[dclayw]

My system drive just died (WD Raptor, the noisiest and hottest drive ever made, and to be honest I 'm glad to be rid of it). I'm replacing with a ssd drive, Samsung 840 EVO. I'm going to be re-installing windows (XP Pro) and wanted some advice on whether I should enable AHCI. AHCI is recommended for ssds but am I going to get any benefit with AHCI on this mobo? If I enable AHCI how will this affect my other drives, I have 2 Seagate barricudas in this PC also. Can AHCI be enabled just for a single drive, or is it for all drives?

My old Raptor system drive was plugged into Sata0, it's one of the 2 yellow ports on this mobo, the other 4, Sata2-5 are the orange ports. Should I leave the Raptor in Sata0?

[profJim]

Re: ssd drive as boot device on EX38-DS4 - AHCI?

I always connect my boot drive using the Sata_0 port.
Both of my P35 systems use AHCI mode with my Samsung ssd boot drives.
My WD Caviar Black sata2 data drives in each system have excellent performance and no problems with AHCI mode.

AHCI mode allows hot plugging sata drives and improves ssd performance.
Normally your system would be limited by sata2 bandwidth limits (approximately 275 MB/s) but the EVO's Rapid caching feature will probably provide higher sequential read and write speeds.