Finally, I have found a way to enable the AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) controller driver under Windows Vista. I tried to enable it before installing Vista but couldn’t find a way to do so without using a floppy drive.
Anyway, the other day I was looking for a way to enable the NCQ (Native Command Queuing) capability of my HDDs, and stumbled upon these two articles, which present an alternative way to enabling AHCI (under XP or Vista) without the need for a format and a reinstall:
HOWTO: enable AHCI mode after installing Windows XP
How to enable AHCI without reformatting Windows Vista
Now, you are surely asking if I had gained any performance improvements from AHCI. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t notice any improvement. I know it’s there, and I know some of the AHCI benefits are not noticeable at user level, but are useful for the HDDs, because AHCI enables power management routines not available under the normal IDE mode. And it enables NCQ which is helpful in extending the HDDs lifecycle, and efficiency.
Learn more about AHCI in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AHCI
