I am getting a SSD, through a promo program. I pay nothing, and get hardware for free. They just want proper reviews of the products. Most of the time, I get to keep what I review, making it extra sweet. In light of this, I am getting a Corsair Force Series GS 240GB drive. Here is a link to the drive. Now, I know that using AHCI is best because of the TRIM support, which will have the drive last longer. Especially with me planing on using it as my OS drive. However, my optical drives are SATA as well, and I only have one controller. I have that Blu-Ray drive for playback, and a DVD-Burner. I don't know if there will be problems with them properly running on AHCI mode in Win7, as I have been running SATA in IDE mode. I know I need to either do the registry hack, or reinstall Windows, and I already plan on re-installing Windows. Searching Google turned up nothing, and I can't buy an add-in controller just for optical drives for a bit, so before it comes in and I want to know if anyone has had any issues. The SATA controller is on my chipset, an older Intel P45 + ICH10R. The optical drives are both Lite-On, and the models are as fallows : iHBS112 and iHAS324
Can you set the SATA mode individually by the ports? If you can then set it to AHCI for the SSD and IDE for the DVD/BluRay drives for compatibility.
If you installed Windows earlier with the SATA controller set to IDE mode, then you MUST re-install Windows after setting the SATA controller to AHCI mode, or do the registry hack. There should not be any problem running any recent (in the last 5-7 years) CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive in AHCI mode. The IDE mode is more of a "compatibility" mode for old hardware. I've been using Windows 7 in AHCI mode since Day 1 and never had any problem with any CD/DVD drives although I have never used a Blu-ray drive yet.
That's GREAT news Adrian Wong! The Blu-Ray drive was made last year, and the Burner is less then 3 years old. Haven't seen the manufacture date in some time for obvious reasons.
TRIM is an ATA command. you do no need AHCI enabled to support TRIM. without AHCI, you lose hotplug and NCQ supports. but i don't see it as problem for desktop user because why would we have to hotplug our OS drive???