[Tutorial] How To Improve Hard Drive SATA Performance By Enabling AHCI – Windows 7
Since the launch of the SATA interface in April 2003, controllers include a new optional mode called AHCI or Advanced Host Controller Interface. This mode allows exploiting the features introduced by SATA interface such as NCQ (Native Command Queuing) or Hot Plug. With NCQ, the drive may receive more than one query entry at a time and decide the best order to perform the operations. This reduces the amount of unnecessary searches of the read heads, and leads to improved performance. By enabling AHCI mode, transfer rate when loading applications or the Windows startup can grow 10 to 20%. In this tutorial, I will show you how to enable AHCI in Windows Vista and Windows 7.