What is AHCI?

Techquickie ·Techquickie ·2018-05-06 · 831 words · ~4 min read
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0:00 thanks for watching techwiki click the subscribe button then enable
0:03 notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so you've
0:07 finally decided to address a huge bottleneck in your computer by upgrading
0:12 to an SSD for your boot drive but when you finally get up and running
0:16 something seems a little off maybe your file transfers are slower than you
0:21 expected underwhelming SSD performance could be
0:25 caused by a somewhat obscure setting in
0:28 your UEFI BIOS you see most modern hard
0:32 drives or ssds can be set to operate in
0:35 either ide mode or ahci mode but what in
0:40 the heck does that mean well there are multiple ways your system
0:44 has of talking to drives
0:47 ide or parallel ata is the standard that
0:51 was used for a long time back when we were all using those huge gray ribbon
0:56 cables to connect hard drives to motherboards
1:00 drives with the newer smaller SATA or
1:03 serial ata connectors that most of us use today can also utilize a newer
1:09 standard called advanced host controller interface or ahci
1:14 ahci enables cool features like hot
1:17 swapping so you don't have to turn off your computer if you want to
1:21 unplug an external drive from an esata port or use that super neato hot swap
1:27 bay in the top of your case a less obvious but also important advantage is
1:32 support for native command cueing which
1:35 affects the way that your drives handle multiple requests to fetch data at one
1:40 time
1:44 on hard drives using ncq can mean the drive's read and write head doesn't have
1:50 to move around as much to get a certain
1:53 piece of information speeding up your access times
1:56 but how does ahci also help speed up ssds
2:01 well although the benefits of ncq on ssds are small or negligible for home
2:06 users many users do report greatly
2:10 increased performance especially for large file transfers in ahci mode
2:15 compared to ide mode due to hci just
2:19 plain being designed with more modern drives in mind
2:24 so then why would you ever want to use ide mode
2:28 can we just get rid of that option well if you're running an older
2:33 operating system such as Windows xp or earlier there's a good chance that it
2:37 won't have native hci support meaning it
2:40 won't play nicely with your drives if your motherboard is set to hdi mode
2:45 unless you do some software trickery when you install the os this might also
2:50 be the case if you're trying to run software from a bootable usb stick or an
2:55 optical disk and if you have a boot drive that you've
2:59 been using in ide mode but then switch over to ahci you might get a boot error
3:05 forcing you to switch back to ide though fortunately if you're using Windows
3:10 there's a registry tweak that you can use to fix this more permanently if
3:14 you're interested we've linked instructions in the video description
3:17 below of course ahci isn't the end game for
3:21 drive protocols and the sexy new one nvm
3:24 express is starting to gain popularity while you won't be able to use it with
3:29 garden variety SATA drives it's being implemented in high performance pci
3:34 express ssds and since NVMe was designed
3:38 from the ground up for solid-state storage it can enable speed several
3:42 times faster than what you'd get with ahci on a standard SATA interface so you
3:48 might want to look into those if you've got some money to burn and milliseconds
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