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notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so you've
finally decided to address a huge bottleneck in your computer by upgrading
to an SSD for your boot drive but when you finally get up and running
something seems a little off maybe your file transfers are slower than you
expected underwhelming SSD performance could be
caused by a somewhat obscure setting in
your UEFI BIOS you see most modern hard
drives or ssds can be set to operate in
either ide mode or ahci mode but what in
the heck does that mean well there are multiple ways your system
has of talking to drives
ide or parallel ata is the standard that
was used for a long time back when we were all using those huge gray ribbon
cables to connect hard drives to motherboards
drives with the newer smaller SATA or
serial ata connectors that most of us use today can also utilize a newer
standard called advanced host controller interface or ahci
ahci enables cool features like hot
swapping so you don't have to turn off your computer if you want to
unplug an external drive from an esata port or use that super neato hot swap
bay in the top of your case a less obvious but also important advantage is
support for native command cueing which
affects the way that your drives handle multiple requests to fetch data at one
time
on hard drives using ncq can mean the drive's read and write head doesn't have
to move around as much to get a certain
piece of information speeding up your access times
but how does ahci also help speed up ssds
well although the benefits of ncq on ssds are small or negligible for home
users many users do report greatly
increased performance especially for large file transfers in ahci mode
compared to ide mode due to hci just
plain being designed with more modern drives in mind
so then why would you ever want to use ide mode
can we just get rid of that option well if you're running an older
operating system such as Windows xp or earlier there's a good chance that it
won't have native hci support meaning it
won't play nicely with your drives if your motherboard is set to hdi mode
unless you do some software trickery when you install the os this might also
be the case if you're trying to run software from a bootable usb stick or an
optical disk and if you have a boot drive that you've
been using in ide mode but then switch over to ahci you might get a boot error
forcing you to switch back to ide though fortunately if you're using Windows
there's a registry tweak that you can use to fix this more permanently if
you're interested we've linked instructions in the video description
below of course ahci isn't the end game for
drive protocols and the sexy new one nvm
express is starting to gain popularity while you won't be able to use it with
garden variety SATA drives it's being implemented in high performance pci
express ssds and since NVMe was designed
from the ground up for solid-state storage it can enable speed several
times faster than what you'd get with ahci on a standard SATA interface so you
might want to look into those if you've got some money to burn and milliseconds
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