Backround Info
Specs.
Antec Dark Fleet DF85
Asus 23" Monitor
Gigabyte 970A-UD3
AMD 955 @ 3.8 w/1.376v on cpu-vcore
Hyper 212 Plus W/2fans Idle:22C-42C
Corsair Vengence 8 gigs
Evga 560TI
2 - Lite On DVD Burners
2 - 750G WD Black
Corsair 750W PSU
Roswell Low Profile NIC card
Logitech 540 5.1 surround w/sub
SIIG 7.1 Sound Card
Windows 7 64 bit and XP 32 bit
Main Hard Drive( connected on sata port "0" ) I am using XP Pro.I have this partitioned into 3 parts.50 gigs for os and 650 gigs for storage,and 8 gigs for a page file.I have alot of my programs on this drive.This drives runs 24/7,and is used for browsing,downloading,encoding ect...I use XP because its lighter on resources than 7,and runs fine for my purpose
Second Hard drive(connected on sata port "1") I have this drive partitioned into 3 parts(50-80-550).I plan on running a dual boot on this drive.Xp and W7.I will have 50 gigs for XP,80 gigs for W7,and 550 gigs for games.I will use the 550 gigs as a big game folder for both OS.I also plan on using stripped versions of xp and 7 using n-light on both OS.This drive is dedicated only for gaming.Since I will have a dual boot on this drive.I will install xp first then 7.I plan on disconnecting my other drive and then set up a dual boot with this drive.I figure the only way to access this drive will be to go in the bios and boot from sata port "1" when needed,so I get the option for dual boot.
SSD Drive- Crucial 64 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s -I am planing on ordering this drive soon.I will be running Windows 7 64bit.I will be using this for surfing & gaming .Not sure what channel I should connect this drive.Does it matter? I also have 2 dvd drives .Again I will install this OS separately.I will go in bios and boot drive when needed.
I have been doing alot aof research on AHCI mode.I will need to use this mode when I add the ssd drive.It seems this has 3 main advantages
Supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing) allowing SATA drives to accept more than one command at a time and dynamically reorder the commands for maximum efficiency.
Supports hot plugging of devices
Supports staggered spin ups of multiple hard drives at boot time
From what I read I will only need to follow a few steps to get this to work
1) Make sure PC is off. Unplug all drives except the optical drive and connect up the SSD.
2) Boot into BIOS, change SATA mode to AHCI. Change boot priority to boot onto optical first.
3) Restart, and insert Windows 7 install disk. Follow the instructions on screen to install Windows 7 onto the SSD.
4) Once that's done, restart PC and change boot priority to SSD first. You may replug back your other drives now.
5) Install drivers and updates.
There are a few tweaks you can do to Windows to optimize the SSD if you wish but with these current SSDs Windows does a pretty good job on looking after the SSD. Most common tweaks however is disable hibernation and shrink the size of the page file on it, so less files are written onto the drive and ensuring it has a nice long lifespan.
Thanks to absic for the driver information below
"With Windows7 you do not usually need to pre-install the AMD AHCI drivers as the native Microsoft AHCI drivers will install and work fine. If you want to use the AMD Drivers then you can install them once you have Windows7 up and running.The latest AMD AHCI and Southbridge drivers can be downloaded from here:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/raid_windows.aspx and are the 11.12 version which are much newer than those available on the Gigabyte site."
Since I will be adding a ssd drive and using windows 7 I will need to use AHCI mode.The question I'm asking is "Once AHCI is enabled in the BIOS and the hard drive is formatted in Win7 and is installed (clean) do ALL drives come under AHCI?
My current bios settings are- The onboard SATA controller is set to enabled,and onboard SATA controller to Native IDE.Both of my hard drives are Sata II.I really don't see any advantage using AHCI mode for Windows XP,which is my main drive,except maybe," Native Command Queuing."My second drive is only for gaming,so no advantage for my purpose,but the ssd drive I don't have a clue.