Enabling AHCI in BIOS for SSD
- by Robert
I am trying to help a friend with a desktop upgrade. It is an old machine with an Intel DG31 main board. The board has 1 IDE port to which a DVD-ROM drive is connected, and 2 SATA ports. 1 SATA port had a hard drive with XP on it. I have made that the secondary drive now and wiped the OS as requested, so it is just for data. The new SSD has been installed but I read that for best results one must enable AHCI in the BIOS? So I checked and in the BIOS there is a SATA Mode setting with 2 options - Native and Legacy. I think Native means AHCI? After setting to Native, I installed Windows 7 Home Premium and all the latest drivers from Intel's website and all Windows Updates. Now when I check Device Manager I see this:
Also Microsoft says HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci\Start and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV\Start should have value 0 for AHCI but I see that the value is 3 for both. So does this mean that Native mode is not AHCI? Or Windows 7 ignored BIOS setting and installed in IDE mode, maybe because both cables are present? Please help me enable AHCI on this system. Thanks!