SATA3/SATA2 IDE or AHCI?

Hi all

I am in the process of setting up a new PC and would like some advice please.

I have a Gigabyte X58A-UD3R MB which has SATA2 and SATA3 ports. I have two SATA3 1TB drives and 1 SATA2 1TB drive. I was going to keep things simple and have them all as separate drives, therefore no need to RAID them.

(OS: Win7 Ultimate 64bit)

I am planning to;
- use 1 SATA3 drive partitioned 40% for system and 60% for User Files.
- use 1 SATA3 drive for All current Photos and Videos in use
- use the SATA2 drive as storage for older Photos and Videos

So am I best to set them all up as AHCI or IDE?
What about the CD/DVD does that need to be AHCI too (have not checked if there is actually a choice for that yet)?
Or does file transfer from IDE to AHCI and AHCI to IDE work fine?

Please help, have system sitting in BIOS now trying to figure out what is the better way to go.

I have tried it with AHCI for all the SATA2/SATA3 drives and when I boot with the Win 7 Install disk it recognises the drives without a need to install any drivers for them, is that correct or is Windows seeing them as IDE still?

Note when it boots (the PC) before I get to the boot selection screen I can see an ATA loader looking for the drives and it flashes up quickly no HDDs just before I get the boot selection list... help please what is this all about?

 

Hello,

Windows 7 comes with generic AHCI drivers pre-loaded, allowing you to install the full ones after installing windows 7. I would recommend setting the drives up as AHCI to enable the full range of SATA features. If the CD/DVD drive(s) is(are) SATA then it(they) should be compatible with AHCI, if not then most motherboards have a feature to allow the last 2/3 ports to be controlled independently from the rest, so you could put the last ports into IDE mode for the CD/DVD drive(s).

File transfer IDE <--> AHCI will be fine.

The ATA loader is looking for devices connected to the IDE header of the board. If you do not have anything connected then nothing will show in the list.