It's as much a BIOS thing as a driver thing - your 430's BIOS has 2 options, RAID or RAID Autodetect ATA. The RAID setting "doubles up" as AHCI mode when you're not using RAID - theoretically AHCI is better/faster than the older ATA mode.. More on IMSM, AHCI, etc. below:
If you've never changed that setting , it's still set as RAID from Dell, and WIndows 7 installed the basic driver already for running the SATA controller in RAID/AHCI, but I have no idea if the Windows 7 version of the drivers have all the features or not - probably not. I'd go ahead and install the latest version from Intel.
Hi Alexandra_P - I have a month old Dell XPS 8100 with a single hard drive. In the BIOS it set to RAID. Should it be set to something else? I haven't had a system in years so almost everything is new to me.
Jeff - late, I know, but your settings are the default, and they're what they're supposed to be. If you did change it, your system probably won't even boot - it's the mode the OS IS INSTALLED in that counts, unless you're willing to do some geek gymnastics to manipulate the drivers and registry settings..
Dell tends to be minimalist in its BIOS settings, and RAID mode for your 8100 seems to be just the same as the 430 original to this thread - basically the Dell BIOS RAID mode "doubles up" as meaning AHCI with only one drive.
We're basically at the tail end of a transitional period. XP (being 10 years old) only natively supports older IDE/ATA hard drives, not the newer SATA standards with built-in RAID/AHCI capable drive controllers (Dell did "slipstream" those drivers in to their newer XP OEM disks, but retail copies of XP don't have them). Vista/WIN7 supports both the older standard AND the newer SATA/RAID/AHCI options, though as I mentioned above I don't know how "full-featured" the options built into the operating system really are.
Using the older "ATA/IDE" compatible mode comes up here most when people want to downgrade to XP from a Vista or Win7 system. While in some cases you can load the drivers in as part of the install to support the newer SATA drives, it's just easier to change the drive mode to an older standard. But as time marches on, chipset/PC manufacturers are less and less likely to have those drivers available. XP has turned out to be extremely hard to kill, but it's going to die someday.
Most PC's built in the last few years have 100% SATA drives, but old habits and old PC's die hard. Plenty of people here want their old IDE/ATA drive PC's to run Win7, or their new PC's to run XP. So you get the option to do it both ways.
BTW - I'm still using XP myself. Anymore it's more economical to buy a new PC with all-OEM licenses than buy new software....
ALEXANDRA_P - Thank you for such a great explanation! 15-20 years ago I was a geek (and proud of it!) But soooooo much has changed I am lost most of the time. I am just trying to get every bit of performance out of this system I can without extreme measures like overclocking and the like. I never used XP. More like DOS and I think it was Windows 3.1? I was a BETA tester for Win 95. Olden days. See my post in "New to the Community" to see how I feel about 99.7% of the folks in these forums.
Hi. I'm trying to switch to RAID on mode after having installed windows 7 x64. I upgraded to an SSD and would like to take advantage of the performance increase of AHCI. I followed the steps on another forum to change the registry values to enable AHCI.Then I downloaded the 64bit intel drivers linked in the post about then tried to manually update the drivers in device manager. I'm stuck on a few problems though. There are 2 .inf files to choose from when updating the driver. One is iaAHCI.inf and the other is iaStor.inf. then after I choose a file it has a list of different devices to choose from. They are all named something like Intel ICH7, ICH8, ICH9R, etc....
Does anyone know which file to choose and which model or whatever am I supposed to choose?
Alexandra_P
3 Apprentice
•
2.6K Posts
0
April 21st, 2010 17:00
It's as much a BIOS thing as a driver thing - your 430's BIOS has 2 options, RAID or RAID Autodetect ATA. The RAID setting "doubles up" as AHCI mode when you're not using RAID - theoretically AHCI is better/faster than the older ATA mode.. More on IMSM, AHCI, etc. below:
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm
http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-012304.htm (Intel's renamed the newest versions Rapid Storage, not Matrix, but same principle).
If you've never changed that setting , it's still set as RAID from Dell, and WIndows 7 installed the basic driver already for running the SATA controller in RAID/AHCI, but I have no idea if the Windows 7 version of the drivers have all the features or not - probably not. I'd go ahead and install the latest version from Intel.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/SearchResult.aspx?lang=eng&ProductFamily=Chipsets&ProductLine=Chipset+Software&ProductProduct=Intel%C2%AE+Rapid+Storage+Technology+%28Intel%C2%AE+RST%29
Each download has a "read me" with lots of details on checking versions, etc.
Jeff Hoffman
2 Intern
•
881 Posts
0
April 24th, 2010 11:00
Hi Alexandra_P - I have a month old Dell XPS 8100 with a single hard drive. In the BIOS it set to RAID. Should it be set to something else? I haven't had a system in years so almost everything is new to me.
Thank You.
Jeff
Alexandra_P
3 Apprentice
•
2.6K Posts
0
April 27th, 2010 21:00
Jeff - late, I know, but your settings are the default, and they're what they're supposed to be. If you did change it, your system probably won't even boot - it's the mode the OS IS INSTALLED in that counts, unless you're willing to do some geek gymnastics to manipulate the drivers and registry settings..
Dell tends to be minimalist in its BIOS settings, and RAID mode for your 8100 seems to be just the same as the 430 original to this thread - basically the Dell BIOS RAID mode "doubles up" as meaning AHCI with only one drive.
We're basically at the tail end of a transitional period. XP (being 10 years old) only natively supports older IDE/ATA hard drives, not the newer SATA standards with built-in RAID/AHCI capable drive controllers (Dell did "slipstream" those drivers in to their newer XP OEM disks, but retail copies of XP don't have them). Vista/WIN7 supports both the older standard AND the newer SATA/RAID/AHCI options, though as I mentioned above I don't know how "full-featured" the options built into the operating system really are.
Using the older "ATA/IDE" compatible mode comes up here most when people want to downgrade to XP from a Vista or Win7 system. While in some cases you can load the drivers in as part of the install to support the newer SATA drives, it's just easier to change the drive mode to an older standard. But as time marches on, chipset/PC manufacturers are less and less likely to have those drivers available. XP has turned out to be extremely hard to kill, but it's going to die someday.
Most PC's built in the last few years have 100% SATA drives, but old habits and old PC's die hard. Plenty of people here want their old IDE/ATA drive PC's to run Win7, or their new PC's to run XP. So you get the option to do it both ways.
BTW - I'm still using XP myself. Anymore it's more economical to buy a new PC with all-OEM licenses than buy new software....
Jeff Hoffman
2 Intern
•
881 Posts
0
April 27th, 2010 22:00
ALEXANDRA_P - Thank you for such a great explanation! 15-20 years ago I was a geek (and proud of it!) But soooooo much has changed I am lost most of the time. I am just trying to get every bit of performance out of this system I can without extreme measures like overclocking and the like. I never used XP. More like DOS and I think it was Windows 3.1? I was a BETA tester for Win 95. Olden days. See my post in "New to the Community" to see how I feel about 99.7% of the folks in these forums.
Thank You very much for your time and effort.
Jeff :emotion-11:
wakeboardr116
7 Posts
0
June 16th, 2010 17:00
Hi. I'm trying to switch to RAID on mode after having installed windows 7 x64. I upgraded to an SSD and would like to take advantage of the performance increase of AHCI. I followed the steps on another forum to change the registry values to enable AHCI.Then I downloaded the 64bit intel drivers linked in the post about then tried to manually update the drivers in device manager. I'm stuck on a few problems though. There are 2 .inf files to choose from when updating the driver. One is iaAHCI.inf and the other is iaStor.inf. then after I choose a file it has a list of different devices to choose from. They are all named something like Intel ICH7, ICH8, ICH9R, etc....
Does anyone know which file to choose and which model or whatever am I supposed to choose?
wakeboardr116
7 Posts
0
June 17th, 2010 20:00
Anyone have any ideas? I'd really like to get it working without having to do a reinstall.