AHCI or IDE mode

[idata]

Whenever i choose AHCI mode in bios, sometimes there is a long delay (1 minute) at boot time. Workaround is to choose IDE instead, eventhough i experience better performance using AHCI. Is this a compatibility issue with my motherboard (rampage 2 extreme x58) or with some drives in general? I do in fact have an optical drive on a pata controller (jmicron jb363) which if not mistaken can lead to problems using AHCI, so i guess i should either not use it or replace it with a sata version.

Any suggestions?

[idata]

AHCI does load longer than IDE as someone explained above. Those using AHCI have an "extra" screen loading on startup.

Just noticed he said "sometimes it takes longer..." Hmm....

[idata]

The explanation above that you refer to talks about the BIOS. Guz refers to a screen with the Windows logo. Hence, the explanation you cite does not appear to apply to his problem.

[idata]

Yes, but that is the loading screen and it could be the BIOS because AHCI takes longer to load than IDE; thus, takes longer to get to the Windows logo screen where you put in your password.

[idata]

By the time the Windows screen comes up, the BIOS has already found the boot drive and has already started reading the boot drive. There should be no other drive enumeration by the BIOS, so there's really nothing related to AHCI vs IDE that I can see that will slow down the boot while the BIOS is reading the disk.

Some HW glitch or BIOS bug could always cause it to take a long time, but the long delays are, in my experience, usually some storage driver or stack taking a long time to enumerate its disks. His 18 seconds vs 77 seconds looks to me like a 60 second timeout inserted into the boot process.

[idata]

ZXTT95 -

You seem to have some experience with Windows storage driver enumeration issues; I just installed an Intel X25-M G2 and am getting boot times equivalent to what I got on my former 7200rpm boot drive ~24s. The SSD should be faster no?

The hangup is the 7200rpm drive which is now my secondary drive (Vista loves to access it during load even though I'm booting from the SSD); if I disable it in device manager, my boot time drops by 10s.

I'm running the latest Intel ICH10R SATA AHCI Controller 8.9.0.1023 from Matrix Storage Manager, BIOS is set to AHCI.

I posted over here:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistaperformance/thread/ea530723-c3fe-4817-9de1-68c...

Any clues on how to optimize this? I've played with IDE and reverting to Microsoft AHCI driver with similar results, although I get a few random fast boots I can't explain even when the 7200rpm drive is not disabled.